John Mellencamp – Life, Death, Love And Freedom (2008) [HDTracks FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

“John Mellencamp is true original, a writer and performing artist of passion, talent and spirit who in the course of his exceptional career has maintained a unique and distinctive voice in his songwriting”, said Glen Barros, president & CEO of Concord Music Group who oversees the Hear Music label. “The songs on this record are perhaps his most intimate, honest and poignant of his career. We are delighted to have this opportunity to work on ‘Life, Love, Death and Freedom.

After making much of his artistic integrity and opposition to corporate interference for most of his career, John Mellencamp prefaced his previous album, 2007’s Freedom’s Road, by licensing one of its songs, “Our Country,” for use in a television commercial for a truck. The broad exposure for the brief excerpt from the song helped give him his first singles chart entry in eight years, a one-week appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 88; it’s not clear how many trucks it may have helped sell. There don’t seem to be any songs on Mellencamp’s 23rd album, Life Death Love and Freedom, that could be used to sell products. The choruses of songs like “Longest Days” (“Life is short, even in its longest days”) and “John Cockers” (“I ain’t got no friends”) just don’t seem to lend themselves to association with shopping of any kind. And maybe that’s the point. Mellencamp’s second consecutive album to use the word “Freedom” in the title is really the 56-year-old singer/songwriter’s reflection on the lack of freedom, along with a life that seems to be almost over, love still idealized (the Buddy Holly-like “odd song out” here, “My Sweet Love”), and death, plenty of death. Musically, Mellencamp seems to have been listening closely to the first five Bob Dylan albums, paying more attention to the first of them, the largely traditional, folk-blues-styled Bob Dylan, than the last, the folk-rock Bringing It All Back Home. “If I Die Sudden,” for example, has much of the feel and sound of “In My Time of Dyin’” on Bob Dylan. But unlike the young Dylan, who probably sang such songs without any direct consciousness of his own mortality, the aging Mellencamp, who has survived one heart attack already, brings real conviction to his reflections on death. Unfortunately, he is not much reconciled to it. He looks back regretfully on his heedless youth, and he has the sense not only that he personally has failed to fulfill his promise, but that the world he sees around him has declined instead of improving. “Everything you were after has gone down the drain,” he laments in the concluding track, “A Brand New Song.” This follows “For the Children,” in which he attempted to muster some hope for the next generation, managing the conclusion, “All I can do is my best and be thankful for what we’ve got.” In truth, the forced pessimism of these songs is consistent for an artist who titled an early album Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did and sang, in the chorus of his most famous song, “Jack & Diane,” “Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” Now, however, he is able to invest it with an assumption of experienced, mature wisdom. Yet it remains as much about him as it is about the world he sees around him.

Tracklist:
01 – Longest Days
02 – My Sweet Love
03 – If I Die Sudden
04 – Troubled Land
05 – Young Without Lovers
06 – John Cockers
07 – Don’t Need This Body
08 – A Ride Back Home
09 – Without A Shot
10 – Jena
11 – Mean
12 – County Fair
13 – For The Children
14 – A Brand New Song

Download:

mqs.link_JhnMellencampLifeDeathLveAndFreedm2008HDTracks2496.part1.rar
mqs.link_JhnMellencampLifeDeathLveAndFreedm2008HDTracks2496.part2.rar

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