on the Scarecrow" or as irresistible as "Cherry Bomb." Instead, it's an assured, personal and, yeah, mature record, an exercise in consolidation and continuity and craftsmanship.
The first thing you notice is the way the album sounds. Like Springsteen, Petty and Seger, the other major American mainstream rockers who emerged during the past two decades, Mellencamp has a band whose distinctive sound alternately defines, inspires and limits him. Its signposts are the remarkable, lean whap of Kenny Aronoff's drums and the gritty guitar rasp of Larry Crane: These guys make dirty, rough-hewn Stones-style rock that packs a real wallop. But unlike the E Street Band, the Heartbreakers and others of that ilk, Mellencamp's mainstream rock band has, on The Lonesome Jubilee and now on Big Daddy, been distinguished by decidedly nonmainstream touches that give this thoroughly citified genre a touch of the Appalachian hills or the Southern bayous: fiddles, accordions, dulcimers, banjos, penny whistles.
The result is a sound more distinctive and refreshing than that of any of Mellencamp's contemporaries. Certainly, it's true that fiddles and accordions are the lead instruments in some of the most invigorating pop music being made today – from Louisiana's Beausoleil to England's Oyster Band – but it's startling to find them on AOR radio. And for that reason alone, Big Daddy deserves attention.
Of course, the sound of the album is nothing new: Mellencamp toyed with this approach on some of Scarecrow, then developed it fully on The Lonesome Jubilee. And in the same way, the theme of Big Daddy returns to a vein he's mined before: American dreams, and the difficulty of ever realizing them. You could listen to the album, take note of Mellencamp's continued fondness for the heartland and borrow a movie title to describe it: Field of Dreams. Except there's no Hollywood happy ending anywhere on the album.
Big Daddy picks up where the last verse of the single "Paper in Fire" left off; these are songs about the pursuit of dreams, in which the fever of that pursuit as often as not either destroys the dreams themselves or blinds the characters to what's happening around them. It's an album pe
