![]() ![]() Another old friend, Mike Wanchic, a guitarist in Mellencamp’s ’80s bands, shows up on two tracks. It isn’t until the fifth song in, “Sweet Honey Brown,” that the music on One-Eyed Jack comes from out of the shadows a bit, with its assertive drumming and electric guitar bursts from Andy York, a longtime collaborator of Mellencamp and of Ian Hunter and others. “Streets of Galilee,” with its starkly beautiful guitar-and-piano backing, is from the viewpoint of a man who admits to being a loser on a downward spiral. “Driving in the Rain” offers loping acoustic strumming and accordion atmospherics behind a song about memories of an earlier, more positive time. And the backdrop is mostly acoustic guitars, fiddles, accordions and unobtrusive drumming. ![]() Those songs, and much of Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, address Mellencamp himself, and that self-assessment is often brutal. “I’ve never taken the high road home … the old low road seems to get me there first,” he says on “Strangers.” And it doesn’t take him long to turn his aim outward: “This world is run by men much more crooked than me.” On “I Always Lie to Strangers” and “I Am a Man That Worries,” John Mellencamp describes a man who’s been damaged, deals with it as he can and offers no apologies. That ravaged voice, though, is perfectly suited to this set of BS-free songs, with credibility that comes mostly from a place of desolate resignation. No longer the young voice of “Jack and Diane,” his talk-singing reflects every bit of his 70 years, and at times on Strictly a One-Eyed Jack veers close to full-on Tom Waits. Strictly a One-Eyed Jack continues in this vein, which has been the norm for Mellencamp longer than the earlier hitmaking phase in the 1980s and early ’90s that made him famous in the first place. It consists of tales of lessons learned (or not) along the hard road of life, set largely to acoustic music with one foot firmly in Americana and the other on stage with the boisterous band playing Saturday night at the neighborhood bar.Īlmost 30 albums into a career that started with performing under a gimmicky name assigned by a manager, the onetime Johnny Cougar has long since shaken off any such shackles, having evolved into a dependable voice speaking out against various forms of oppression and injustice, both societal and personal. The course of John Mellencamp has been fairly well established for the past 20 years or so.
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