Plain Spoken
| Plain Spoken | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by John Mellencamp | ||||
| Released | September 23, 2014 | |||
| Recorded | 2014 | |||
| Studio | Belmont Mall Studio in Belmont, Indiana | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 43:40 | |||
| Label | Republic | |||
| John Mellencamp chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Pop-Topia |  |
| Team Rock |   |
| Rolling Stone |   |
| New York Daily News | |
| Allmusic | |
| PopMatters | |
Plain Spoken is the 22nd studio album by American singer-songwriter and musician John Mellencamp. It was released on September 23, 2014 by Republic Records.Plain Spoken marks the first project of Mellencamp's new lifetime recording contract with Republic Records. The album's cover photo was taken by actress Meg Ryan, Mellencamp's ex-girlfriend.
Mellencamp began recording the album in January 2014 at his Belmont Mall Studio in Belmont, Indiana. In late 2013, Mellencamp told Rolling Stone magazine: "I've got a notebook with 85 new songs that I've written for my next record. T Bone Burnett is going to come out to Indiana sometime in early January and we're gonna go into the studio for however long it takes to make a new album. I haven't done one in five years." As Mellencamp mentioned, T Bone Burnett, who had produced Mellencamp's previous two studio albums and the soundtrack to his musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, was originally going to serve as the producer of Plain Spoken, but Burnett is credited only as "executive producer" in the album's liner notes and there is nobody credited as the album's "producer."
The 10 songs on Plain Spoken tackle a wide variety of subject matter, with some songs taking on a personal tone, some dealing with society problems in the 21st century, and others serving as character sketches of down and out and troubled people.
Of the lead track "Troubled Man," Mellencamp told SiriusXM radio: "'Troubled Man' is a song that I've been toying with since the early '90s. I tried to write it in '91, and then I found that I tried to write it again in 2004, but I was just in my own way, so the song never did make it. The older I get the more I realize that if I just get out of the way of these songs and let the songs come to me, they turn out so much better and not insert John Mellencamp."
The spiritually-centric "Sometimes There's God" is described by Mellencamp as, "Not so much a religious song but more about the feeling of inner peace and being able to identify happiness, disappointment without blaming it all on God."
Mellencamp described "The Isolation of Mister" as "a song about men and how we rationalize and isolate ourselves from our regrets and mistakes."
"Blue Charlotte" is a folk-based acoustic love song sung from the perspective of a man spending his final days with his dying wife. "I really don't know what 'Blue Charlotte' is about," Mellencamp told iHeart Radio in September 2014. "I don't know anybody in that situation. I don't know about people who love each other until death do they part. I don't know anything about it. So all I can figure is that Tennessee Williams sent me that thing."
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