Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CLXXIX--John Mellencamp: Mansions in Heaven

As I was putting together my list of songs for this year, I noticed that, in the three plus (!) years I'd been writing a weekly post about music, there were a shitload of artists whose work I had spent countless hours listening to that had yet to have a mention here on FNJ.  Tom Petty got a holler a few weeks back, and in the coming weeks I'll be featuring songs by Van Morrison, the Band, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Johnny Cash, and a host of others.  This week it's John Mellencamp, who was the final piece of my Holy Trinity of working class rockers--along with the aforementioned Petty and Bruce Springsteen.

Whereas Springsteen was the Power and the Glory, and Petty was the Reverend of Laid Back
Wisdom, Mellencamp has been the Minister of Pissed Off--though he had a a much better knack than either of them for writing hit singles.  Originally Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar, then onto John Cougar Mellencamp, before finally being allowed to use his given name, Mellencamp started out with a few catchy singles about life in the midwest, before graduating to writing songs that went much deeper into our nation's psyche.  His Rain on the Scarecrow LP is probably one of the ten best ever made, and he followed it up with years of releases full of smart songs about our world.  For his troubles Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and will be inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame this year.  Mellencamp was one of the original founders of Farm Aid, which has raised over $50 million to help keep family farms afloat, and has been a frequent critic of our enemies on the right, including their pseudo God, Ronald Reagan.  Not bad for a kid from Seymour, Indiana.

Released in 1989 on his Big Daddy LP, "Mansions in Heaven" was never released as a single, so again this week there will be no shout outs to Billboard's charts.  It is, however, a chance to do something that I originally wanted to do a lot more of with Friday Night Jukebox, which is to feature hidden gems from artists that get lost amongst the glittery hits.  And this one certainly got lost--in the Wikipedia entry on Big Daddy, it's the only song that didn't get a recap, and on this week's YouTube video, it's the first one I ever recall to have zero comments.

When I was still a young man at thirty years of age, I thought "Mansions in Heaven" was a song about the hope for better days.  Now that I'm an old man of almost sixty years, after listening to it numerous times in preparation for this post, I'm convinced the song is about a man at peace with his small lot in life.  Whether or not that's art imitating my stages of life, "Mansions in Heaven" is sparse in its instrumentation, featuring only a lightly strummed acoustic guitar before the band kicks in on the chorus.  Mellencamp delivers a fine performance, at times almost speak singing (or is it sing speaking?) the protagonists wizened story.  But the creme de la creme, that tiny small moment that makes the song so much more than just more filler for the hits, is the "oh-oh"s that are seamlessly inserted in the middle of the two lines of the chorus, both of which lead you to believe that the angels really are descending to take him to his mansions in heaven.  All in all, "Mansions in Heaven" is a subtle Mellencamp masterpiece that showcases the human touch of one of pop music's best songwriters.

Lyric Sheet:  "Withstood the heartache/Kept on believing/It ain't winning or losing/Just the singing of the song..."

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee