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John Cougar Mellencamp's new album -- "Big Daddy" (Polygram) -- starts easily, with no fuss, like a veteran ballplayer trotting slowly out to take his position in center field. No need to impress anyone, no need to put on a show: He knows what he can do, and the rest of us will find out after we've watched him play. But then he comes up to bat, and
there's tension in his stance. Or -- to scrap the analogy -- when Mellencamp starts to
sing he sounds troubled, sometimes almost lost. It's no secret that he's troubled,
too, in real life -- troubled with the breakup of his marriage, troubled with the empty
demands of massive pop fame. And that's largely what this album
is about. You can hear it in songs like "Big Daddy": "Now they all see
through you and you're sinking like a stone." And you can hear it most ironically in
"Pop Singer." "I don't want to be a pop singer," he tells us - in a
song that's on the charts as a current pop hit. (He might just as well be talking
about all sorts of empty pop music lives. "I don't want to hang out after the
show," he sings -- and he might as well be talking about the sometimes empty life of
a pop critic, who bounces nightly from one industry party to the next.)And what's most arresting about the
song is the way it suddenly stops, leaving unanswered -- even unasked -- questions jabbing
at you in the silence.
Meanwhile Mellencamp's wonderful band just keeps playing, weaving separate strands of
sound into a tapestry that's much livelier, more optimistic and even much more alert. They
sound like friends who've known each other for years, especially in "To Live,"
where sometimes they all seem to be talking at once and then sometimes the conversation
quiets down, leaving only the hush of a violin and a gently tapping cymbal.
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