This is effectively the entire studio catalogue, and includes all the American singer-songwriter’s albums recorded as John Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp and John Mellencamp for various record labels. The set contains a total of 223 tracks and spans 35 years. Twelve of the albums have bonus tracks, sourced from the 2005 re-mastered versions of Mellencamp’s Mercury releases.
Only John Mellencamp, whose career began with a series of wrong turns, raw determination, and the audaciousness to demand he be taken seriously could create a box set as strange, representative, and labyrinthine as On the Rural Route 7609. In the era of the “track,” Mellencamp has issued a massive, beautifully packaged, and exhaustively annotated four-disc career retrospective that doesn’t lean on his hits (many aren’t here), but rather on more obscure album cuts, outtakes, rarities (17 selections make their debuts here), and more recent material – numerous selections come from 2007’s Freedom’s Road and 2008’s Life Love Death and Freedom…
Although Mercury Records had delivered five consecutive platinum albums for John Mellencamp, he left the label in 1997, complaining about its inability to break hit singles for him anymore, and signed to Columbia Records. His self-titled label debut, issued the day before his 47th birthday, seemed intended to mark a new beginning for an artist who had managed more than one career rebirth…
John Mellencamp releases live album and documentary titled: The Good Samaritan Tour. The documentary, which will be narrated by Academy® Award winner Matthew McConaughey, chronicles Mellencamp’s historic free tour in 2000 when he performed on street corners and in public parks across the country. The new music is just one of many new projects Mellencamp has been working on including original plays, paintings and more.
“Try to keep it as plain spoken as possible…” those are some of the first words the viewer hears in Plain Spoken: From The Chicago Theatre. A self-narrated musical journey, the film encapsulates the sound and soul of John Mellencamp. Stepping outside the boundaries of a concert film or documentary, Plain Spoken blends highly personal voice-overs from Mellencamp with live footage of him performing with his full band at the historic Chicago Theatre, just 250 miles from his native Indiana…
With a career spanning more than 35 years, John Mellencamp has elevated his legacy from pop star to one of the most highly-respected songwriters of a generation. A GRAMMY winner, member of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, and Songwriters Hall Of Fame nominee (among many other accolades), he has achieved a total of 22 Top 40 hits in addition to earning the record for the “Most #1 tracks by a solo artist on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks” chart…