Songoftheday 6/11/20 - In a hand painted night me and Gypsy Scotty are partners, at the Hotel Flamingo wearin' black market shoes...
from the album Mr. Happy Go Lucky (1996)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #14 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 21
Today's song of the day comes from Indiana's pride John Mellencamp, who took his cover of Van Morrison's "Wild Night" with Me'shell Ndegeocello to the top three on the American pop chart in the summer of 1994. However that same year, touring behind the Dance Naked album, he suffered a heart attack that waylaid the rock singer. Inspired by his recovery, Mellencamp even got more experimental with his music choices on his next studio album, Mr. Happy Go Lucky. Hiring on club DJ and remixer most famous for his work with Madonna, Junior Vasquez, John set out to make a record that incorporated electronic percussive beats as well as standard electric rock instruments. Written by Mellencamp with longtime partner George Green, the mixture of jangle pop and thumping rhythms wasn't too out of sorts, and John found himself with his last major pop hit. Actor Matthew McConaughey makes an appearance in the artsy music video...
"Key West Intermezzo" became Mellencamp's lucky 21st (and so far most recent) top-40 pop hit in the U.S. in October of 1996. The song went to #10 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart, while scaling both the Adult Top-40 (#4) and Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") (#15) airplay format lists. Internationally, the single topped the Canadian singles chart for five weeks, while reaching the top-40 in Australia (#21), Iceland (#24), and New Zealand (#35). The Mr. Happy Go Lucky album returned John to the top ten on Billboard's sales chart at #9. The second single from the record, "Just Another Day", also went to #1 in Canada for two weeks, and rose to #13 on both the Mainstream Rock and Adult Top-40 radio charts (and #24 Adult Contemporary), but stalled right under the pop Top-40 at #46 in 1997.
Later that year the singer left long-time label Mercury Records for Columbia, and the former imprint released a hits set that spun off a rock radio hit with "Without Expression" (#25 Mainstream Rock). John's first album with Columbia, a self-titled set, spun off a modest rock hit in "Your Life Is Now", which stopped at #15 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and only climbed to #62 on the pop Hot 100 airplay list (it wasn't released as a commercial single, so ineligible for the main chart). The album just missed the top-40 at #41, his first to miss that mark since his 1979 John Cougar album that brought his first exposure. That was followed by an odds and ends set, Rough Harvest, which was released by Mercury to fulfill his old contract, and it scraped the top half of the albums chart at #99. Mellencamp made two more records for Columbia in the early 2000s, both reaching the top-40, but pop radio had pretty much left him behind. A song with India.Arie from one of them, "Peaceful World", was his most recent rock radio hit at #38 while almost making the Adult Contemporary top ten at #11 in 2001. Another more expansive retrospective, gave John his most recent Adult Contemporary hit with his collaboration with soul artist Babyface, "Walk Tall" (#25 AC, #26 Adult Top-40).
John guested on Travis Tritt's "What Say You", which went to #21 on the Country Singles chart in 2004. Starting over again with Republic Records, Mellencamp released the country-tinged Freedom's Road, and scored his own top-40 country hit with "Our Country". That song got to #39 at country, and climbed to #16 on the Adult Contemporary list. His most recent success at that format came with his 2008 album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, with "My Sweet Love" getting to #25, while going as high as #10 on the Triple A (Adult Album Alternative) format. A second single, "Troubled Land", got to #24 at Triple-A, his last radio hit so far in 2008. Since then. John has released four more studio albums so far, his latest being the covers album Other People's Stuff, which returned John to the top ten on the albums sales chart at #7.
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Here's Mellencamp performing "Key West Intermezzo" and being interviewed by David Letterman...
And finally, live at VH1's Big Backyard Barbecue that same year...
Up tomorrow: Rapper goes for the bad gigolos.
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