“So once you get to that point, the song is pretty much abandoned,” he said. You think, ‘Okay, well, I’m in the studio now, and now it’s time to think about what the guitar player is going to do, and what the bass player is going to do, and what the drummer’s going to do.’ “I’ll hear a song I wrote many years ago called ‘Pink Houses’ on the radio, and I’ll think, ‘Man, I wish I would have spent a little more time on the last verse,’” he articulated to American Songwriter in 2005. McCain immediately stopped using both “Pink Houses” and “Our Country” at his events.Īs timely as the message remains, Mellencamp admitted he wished he would have built a stronger, more meaningful third verse. We just wrote a letter that said, ‘You guys might want to rethink about using this song,’ and they quit using it.” He added, “We didn’t tell him not to use it. Maybe you guys should rethink using the song.’” Bob said, ‘You know, McCain’s using your song.’ I said ‘Well, he can use it if he wants to, but you probably ought to write him a letter and say, ‘You know, not only that you guys are using it, but so is Barack Obama, so is John Edwards, so is Hillary Clinton, and you should understand that Mellencamp is very liberal, and do you really think that it’s pushing your agenda in the right direction? I mean, you’re just really falling in line with all the other liberal candidates. “What happened was that I called up my publicity guy. As he remembered it, in a 2009 interview with NPR, Mellencamp called up his rep Bob Merlis. First, Ronald Reagan used the song in his 1984 reelection stops, and secondly, in 2008, Republican Senator John McCain used it for many of his political rallies and events. The song’s meaning has long been misinterpreted. It was another way for me to sneak something in.” “The American dream had pretty much proven itself as not working anymore. But it’s really an anti-American song,” he told Rolling Stone in the same interview. “This one has been misconstrued over the years because of the chorus – it sounds very rah-rah. In fact, he has stated the song isn’t what many think it is. In observing one man’s existence, he takes great issue with American life, at large. The chipper hand claps and generally groovy tone is deceiving. “You know, he thinks, he’s got it so good / And there’s a woman in the kitchen cleaning up evening slop / And he looks at her and says, ‘Hey darling, I can remember when you could stop a clock.” “There’s a black man with a black cat / Living in a black neighborhood / He’s got an interstate running’ through his front yard,” he depicts. Lyrically, the song takes a straightforward, literal approach. So, I went with that positive route when I wrote this song.” He continued, “Then I imagined he wasn’t isolated, but he was happy.
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