John Mellencamp is currently a featured artist at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. The museum has displayed his collected paintings for the exhibit "Nothing Like I Planned: The Art of John Mellencamp."
The rock icon spoke on the differences between songwriting and painting with Rolling Stone.
"[I] write a song and then, generally, I've gotta take it to the next step of puttin' a band with it, recording it - there's a lot of people involved in that process. In this process, it's just me."
According to Mellencamp painting is a way to express his creativity without the pressure to make a commercial hit:
"Pop music has always been necessary, but I ran into problems; I had too many hit records. You can have too many hit records. It's not a very nice path to go down. You have a hit, you have a hit, you have a hit and then it's like, all of the sudden, that's all people think that you're good for."
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