Hurts So Good

Mellencamp claims he wrote this song as "a goof." In a 1982 interview with The L.A. Herald Examiner, he explained: "My friend George said, why didn't I write a song with the title 'Hurt So Good'? We thought of it as like a Shel Silverstein thing. I wrote it in three minutes, scrawled the first line in soap on the glass door in the shower. It was really just a joke. I think all good things probably started as jokes. Wasn't God having a laugh when he made this whole place?" Mellencamp's friend was George Green, who received a composer credit on this song and went on to co-write many of Mellencamp's hits, including "Human Wheels," "Crumblin' Down" and "Rain On The Scarecrow."

On his 2018 Plain Spoken DVD, Mellencamp talked about what inspired this song: "When I first started playing in rock bands, I didn't realize how crude and mean other fellas could be. How crude they were with women and how crude women were. That led me to write a song called 'Hurts So Good' because I was playing in these bars and I just could not believe the lows people would go to with each other. The thing that surprised me is that it fit my personality perfectly. I fit right in with all that."

Mellencamp was raised in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, where he played in bands and planned his escape. At 21, he took a trip to New York City to check out art school (he is a talented painter) and drop off some demos. Before the trip was over, he got an offer from a management company willing to push him as a recording artist. He took the offer (it was money coming in, rather than going out), setting him on an awkward path to stardom. He got a record deal with MCA but clashed with the label, refusing to mingle with tastemakers or participate in any industry pomp. But he did let his manager change his name to "Johnny Cougar," which he used for his first two albums, the second of which, A Biography (1978), became a surprise hit in Australia thanks to the single "I Need A Lover." Going to that country and seeing how fans react to a pop star made him determined to create more hits - not for the adulation, but for the creative freedom. If he was on the radio, critics and record companies wouldn't matter, and he could call the shots. For his next two albums, he became "John Cougar" and did everything he could to generate hits, with modest success ("Ain't Even Done with the Night" reached #17 in 1981). But it was "Hurts So Good," the first single from his fifth album, American Fool, that gave him the breakthrough he was looking for. Two albums later, he started using his real last name and writing songs like "Pink Houses" and "Rain On The Scarecrow" that reflected more of his true self. The hits kept coming until the '90s, when his music fell out of fashion in favor of hip-hop and grunge. He stayed the course, making music that fed his artistic appetite and performing to smaller but very enthusiastic audiences.