Label: Island Records (US), B0004511-02
Style: Folk Rock, Rock & Roll, Classic Rock
Country: Seymour, Indiana, U.S. (October 7, 1951)
Time: 46:10
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 319 Mb
Charts: US #7, AUS #1, CAN #3, GER #27, NL #33, NOR #12, NZ #6, SWE
#6, SWI #11, UK #25. Australia: Platinum; US: Platinum; Canada: 2x
Platinum.
It doesn’t seem right, using a word like mature to refer to a guy who used to bill himself as Little Bastard — but these days, the word is just about inescapable when you talk about John Mellencamp. For somebody whose work has always suggested a morbid fear of aging, he’s slipping into rock & roll’s version of middle age pretty damn gracefully: His tenth album — his fourth since he shocked a lot of people by getting good — isn’t a big leap forward the way 1983’s Uh-Huh and 1985’s Scarecrow were, and it doesn’t break new musical ground the way 1987’s Lonesome Jubilee did, and on the first few listenings it doesn’t have any singles as bracing as “Rain on the Scarecrow” or as irresistible as “Cherry Bomb.” Instead, it’s an assured, personal and, yeah, mature record, an exercise in consolidation and continuity and craftsmanship.
The first thing you notice is the way the album sounds. Like Springsteen, Petty and Seger, the other major American mainstream rockers who emerged during the past two decades, Mellencamp has a band whose distinctive sound alternately defines, inspires and limits him. Its signposts are the remarkable, lean whap of Kenny Aronoff’s drums and the gritty guitar rasp of Larry Crane: These guys make dirty, rough-hewn Stones-style rock that packs a real wallop. But unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers and others of that ilk, Mellencamp’s mainstream rock band has, on The Lonesome Jubilee and now on Big Daddy, been distinguished by decidedly nonmainstream touches that give this thoroughly citified genre a touch of the Appalachian hills or the Southern bayous: fiddles, accordions, dulcimers, banjos, penny whistles.
(rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/big-daddy-248501/) Review by Steve Pond
It doesn’t seem right, using a word like mature to refer to a guy who used to bill himself as Little Bastard — but these days, the word is just about inescapable when you talk about John Mellencamp. For somebody whose work has always suggested a morbid fear of aging, he’s slipping into rock & roll’s version of middle age pretty damn gracefully: His tenth album — his fourth since he shocked a lot of people by getting good — isn’t a big leap forward the way 1983’s Uh-Huh and 1985’s Scarecrow were, and it doesn’t break new musical ground the way 1987’s Lonesome Jubilee did, and on the first few listenings it doesn’t have any singles as bracing as “Rain on the Scarecrow” or as irresistible as “Cherry Bomb.” Instead, it’s an assured, personal and, yeah, mature record, an exercise in consolidation and continuity and craftsmanship.
The first thing you notice is the way the album sounds. Like Springsteen, Petty and Seger, the other major American mainstream rockers who emerged during the past two decades, Mellencamp has a band whose distinctive sound alternately defines, inspires and limits him. Its signposts are the remarkable, lean whap of Kenny Aronoff’s drums and the gritty guitar rasp of Larry Crane: These guys make dirty, rough-hewn Stones-style rock that packs a real wallop. But unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers and others of that ilk, Mellencamp’s mainstream rock band has, on The Lonesome Jubilee and now on Big Daddy, been distinguished by decidedly nonmainstream touches that give this thoroughly citified genre a touch of the Appalachian hills or the Southern bayous: fiddles, accordions, dulcimers, banjos, penny whistles.
(rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/big-daddy-248501/) Review by Steve Pond
01. Big Daddy Of Them All (03:31)
02. To Live (03:20)
03. Martha Say (03:45)
04. Theo And Weird Henry (04:50)
05. Jackie Brown (04:03)
06. Pop Singer (02:48)
07. Void In My Heart (02:32)
08. Mansions In Heaven (03:06)
09. Sometimes A Great Notion (03:34)
10. Country Gentleman (03:19)
11. J.M.'S Question (03:42)
12. Let It All Hang Out (03:13)
13. Jackie Brown (Acoustic Version) (04:21)
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