ShareThisPicture John Mellencamp in rumpled jeans and a black T-shirt, cigarette dangling from his lips, strumming a well-worn acoustic guitar on a breezy back porch.
That's not literally how the Indiana rocker recorded his new album, "No Better Than This," but the disc has that simple, earthy, earnest feel of a bygone era.
It's a retro record that is more about honesty in artistry than wistful nostalgia, with Mellencamp thumbing his nose at the digitized, multitracked, processed sounds that fill 21st-century airwaves.
It is, Mellencamp said, the most "rebellious" of all his 25 albums.
"I decided to go just as far away from the popular culture of music as I possibly could and just go back to where it began," he explained, leaning against a tall chair in a hotel room in Windsor, Ontario, before performing a concert later that night.
In an era when virtually every hit song is recorded with computerized equipment that isolates each instrument and enables post-recording alterations and overdubs, Mellencamp recorded all of his new songs on a 1955 Ampex mono tape recorder using a single vintage RCA ribbon microphone to capture the action.
"There are no overdubs, no echo, there's no anything," he said. "It's just what the room sounded like and it was fun because it was musicians actually playing music, as opposed to building a record or constructing a song."
The 13 songs were written last year in a flurry of creativity, one of those rare periods of inspiration that artists dream of when the floodgates open and verses, choruses and arrangements flow like a raging river.
"I wrote all those songs in about 10 to 15 days, I don't know. It was just, I'd get up every morning and I'd write. I'd write two or three songs in a day and I let the songs write themselves, as opposed to sometimes when you write songs you try to steer them a way that you would like them to go," Mellencamp said.
"But these songs, I just, they kind of wrote themselves, really. I just let them go wherever they wanted to go and that's how they ended up."
What flowed from Mellencamp's muse are gritty, spartan, touching tunes about life, love and loss as told by a grizzled troubadour who's seen it all.
His gravelly voice, rubbed to a perfect rasp by a jillion cigarettes, harks back to twangy folk, Southern blues, traditional country and Memphis rock, echoing the classic sounds of music icons ranging from Robert Johnson and Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
One of the new disc's most memorable tunes is "Right Behind Me," opening with a haunting violin and a spare, staccato guitar as Mellencamp gives his lyrics a Tom Waits-style grumble and growl.
The first single off "No Better Than This" is the title track, a jangly folk-rocker with a full band romping along at a jaunty pace. Mellencamp must have been coming from a good place, figuratively speaking, when he sings that "you could give me back my youth" or "a fist full of money" or "50 girls waitin' on me," "but it won't get no better than this."
Mellencamp said the new disc was recorded last summer while he was trekking across the country with Dylan and Willie Nelson, performing concerts at minor-league baseball stadiums.
He saw the tour as a perfect opportunity to take that 55-year-old Ampex mono tape recorder for a ride.
"It was kind of a leisurely tour, so I thought, well, hell, at the time, let's make the most out of this," he said.
Working with producer T-Bone Burnett, with whom he recorded 2008's "Life Death Love and Freedom," Mellencamp scheduled recording sessions at three American musical meccas.
His wrestling-with-the-devil song "Right Behind Me," for example, was taped in Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where Delta blues legend Robert Johnson recorded "Terrapane Blues" and "Dust My Broom" more than 70 years ago.
He went so far as to cover the carpet with a wooden dance floor to re-create the sound of the room from the 1930s, and faced the same corner that Johnson sang into when he recorded.
Mellencamp also visited 706 Union Ave. in Memphis -- the home of Sun Studios, where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Howlin' Wolf recorded.
Sam Phillips, the late owner of Sun Studios, put black X's on the linoleum floor marking the best spots, acoustically, for the musicians to stand.
Mellencamp also recorded at the First African Baptist Church, built in 1775 in Savannah, Ga.
Mellencamp entrusted the tapes to Burnett, sending him to Los Angeles with orders to "make them coherent."
"It was absolutely the most fun I've ever had making a record in my life," Mellencamp said. "It was about making music -- organic music made by real musicians -- that's heartfelt and written from the best place it can come from."
(E-mail David Yonke at dyonke(at)theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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