Mellencamp’s New Disc First Since Heart Attack

Heartland rocker John Mellencamp may have honed his craft in the country, but he’s no stranger to city streets. More than any other rocker of his generation, Mellencamp has embraced urban, hip-hop grooves on a new album that promises to be among the most talked about of the year.

It’s Mellencamp’s first disc since suffering a heart attack two years ago - an experience that propelled him into the future, rather than the past.

It’s not every day that you can term a disc groundbreaking, but that describes “Mr. Happy Go Lucky,” in which Mellencamp takes techno-treated, hip-hop rhythms and layers rock guitars over them. The result could have been a disaster in lesser hands, but Mellencamp, aided by Brooklyn sound mixer Junior Vasquez, scored a progressive coup.

“We spent a year and a half making this record, which is a long time for me,” Mellencamp says of the disc, which came out last week. “We spent a lot of time experimenting around with percussion and loops and programs and stuff I’d never used before. There are tracks on this record that have a loop, a program, a drum machine, plus real drums and percussion. There’s a song, ‘Jerry,’ that has 48 tracks’ worth of drums and loops. And to try to piece all that together and make this rhythm work with that rhythm was a real jigsaw puzzle. For guys like me, and for guys in the band, we were using stuff that’s usually found in rap or dance records.”

The glue was Junior Vasquez, who runs a New York City dance club called the Tunnel.

Mellencamp, who in a 20-year career has scored such hits as “Hurts So Good” and “Jack and Diane,” pushes the creative envelope on new tunes “Just Another Day” (in which mandolin meets hip-hop) and “Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First),” in which harmonica meets hip-hop.

The album still brims with Mellencamp’s knack for character sketches, but even these have a ‘90s flair. The song “Jerry” is about a 37-year-old skateboard rider with six children. It’s a long way from the youthful fumblings of “Jack and Diane.” But the most striking new tune is “The Full Catastrophe,” which lyrically is about a father raising two children on a workingman’s pay but musically is a mix of slide-guitar/country-blues with an urban beat. “We were going for Robert Johnson with hip-hop grooves,” says Mellencamp. “If you want to break it down, that’s what it was.”

The music forges a new synthesis, but so do the lyrics. Some also reflect Mellencamp’s recovery from his heart attack. He sings “live while you can” in “Large World Turning.” Clearly, this is a man who has had a brush with mortality. “Nothing lasts forever / My time is next to nothing,” he sings in the album-closing “Life Is Hard.”

“When something like that happens to you, there’s not a day that goes by without thinking about it,” he says of the heart attack. “I mean, it’s in your mind. Because until that happened to me, I was bulletproof. I thought I could stay up as late as I wanted and nothing could hurt me. But when you smoke four packs of cigarettes and you’ve been on tour for the last 16 years and laid your face in cholesterol every night at 3 in the morning with steak and french fries, it catches up to you.”

“Make no mistake, the reason I had that heart attack was my lifestyle. So I had to reinvent that lifestyle. Physically, I’m fine now and can do anything I want. This morning I ran for 45 minutes. I also lift weights every day and don’t eat meat, though I’m sorry to say I’m still smoking. … But what really gets messed up is your head. You think, ‘Hey, I was really close to dying one night, a lot closer than any 40-year-old guy needs to be.’ So I’m sure it’s snuck into my songwriting.”

Mellencamp has no plans to tour, intending instead to promote the album by appearances on TV talk shows and the like.