John Mellencamp was recently on hand at Indiana University in Bloomington, his hometown, for the unveiling on the school's Fine Arts Plaza of a statue of him playing the guitar. It stands beside a statue of another Bloomington native, the late musician Hoagy Carmichael.
Mellencamp tells People, "There’s Hoagy sitting there trying to play the piano, and I always thought that was a pretty nice thing. So when it was suggested to me, I said, ‘Well, as long as I’m next to Hoagy, this would be great.’ So it’s like I’m standing there with Hoagy Carmichael and it looks like we’re writing together...
“IU and I have been joined at the hip for quite some time, and the new president there [Pamela Whitten], she’s just fantastic. So I would say that she’s made a lot of this happen… The legacy of my involvement with Indiana University goes back a long, long time...
"My dad used to say to me when I was a kid, he would go, ‘John, here today, gone tomorrow, forgotten in two weeks.’ And that stuck with me. It made my life easier. People struggle and they worry about their legacy and what they’re going to leave behind. I never gave a [crap] about it. I didn’t care about it because in my brain, it just wasn’t real. I didn’t need that motivation, for legacy. I was always just motivated because I’m lucky. You’re talking to the luckiest guy in the world.”
Mellencamp also performed at the unveiling, doing acoustic versions of "Small Town," "Rain on the Scarecrow," and "Jack & Diane."
The statue is based on a photo of him taken by his second and last ex-wife Elaine.
Mellencamp plans to return to the studio in January to start working on a new album.
“I’ve got maybe, I don’t know, 20, 30 songs written,” he says. “Songwriting, you have to be… You’re like an open vessel. I’ll be doing something and all of a sudden it’ll be like, ‘Okay, John, put down what you’re doing and go write this down.’ It’s like, I don’t want to write a song, but then it always gets the best of me."
Mellencamp's last album was 2023's Orpheus Descending.
Check out his original post about it here from John's official Instagram page.