Of those, the only one to call Bloomington home is rock ‘n’ roll legend John Mellencamp.
Mellencamp will return to Bloomington to perform at IU Auditorium on Tuesday and Wednesday. He is on the road for an 80-show tour of North America that started in South Bend at the Morris Performing Arts Center on Jan. 21 and will end in Indianapolis at the Bankers Life Fieldhouse on ?Aug. 4.
The tour is in support of his most recent album, “Plain Spoken,” which was released September 2014. Each online ticket purchase for the tour will be accompanied by a download code for the new album.
Writing for the Boston Globe, Ken Capobianco said Mellencamp’s 22nd album sees the Hoosier musician continuing to reduce “his music to its acoustic roots, while struggling with existential questions and examining an America gone awry.”
The album was released on Republic Records and marks the beginning of Mellencamp’s relationship with the label. The terms of his new contract aren’t public, but it is referred to as a “lifetime” contract by music magazine Billboard.
According to the tour press release on Mellencamp’s website, the album is “an unparalleled new chapter in Mellencamp’s distinctive songbook.”
Supporting him for the entirety of the North American tour is country singer-songwriter Carlene Carter. Carter is the daughter of June Carter and Carl Smith, the granddaughter of “Mother” Maybelle Carter, as well as the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash.
Mellencamp’s website says this list causes people to say she has been born into country music royalty, but “she prefers to think of herself, simply, as a Carter Girl.”
Her identity as a “Carter Girl” also serves as the title of her most recent album released April 2014. Her heritage is clear on the album; most of the 12 songs are new arrangements of songs written by members of the ?Carter family.
“She doesn’t approach these songs as sacred relics to be enshrined with pious respect,” Ken Tucker writes for NPR. “Rather, she treats them like living, vital pieces of art that can withstand being taken apart, thought about and re-imagined.”
Although she has released about half as many albums as Mellencamp, Carter has been recording albums for just as long. Her 1978 eponymous debut was released just two years after Mellencamp’s ?debut, “Johnny Cougar.”
Capobianco also wrote in his review of Mellencamp’s new album that “what remains of his jubilee has become more lonesome,” but he won’t be alone performing in his hometown, surrounded by fellow Hoosiers.
