that was a beautiful line. 'I was hung up with God – I was trying to find God' is what he's saying. I guess you guys figured that out, right?" Mellencamp concluded: "I related to that song ever since I was like 17 years old". Sad Clowns: Mellencamp told Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone magazine: "As soon as I wrote that, I looked up and said, 'Thanks, Ray.' Because I know it's a Ray Davies song, like 'Sunny Afternoon' – a self-deprecating song". My Soul's Got Wings: Mellencamp also told Gardner the story of how he set this Woody Guthrie poem to music: "Nora Guthrie called me up [in 2003] – for those who don't know, that's Woody's daughter – and asked if I would accept the Woody Guthrie Award and, of course, who wouldn't, so I said 'yes,' and ever since then her and I have been very friendly. She's always saying, 'Let me send you some of Woody's poetry and see if you can turn it into a song.' I said, 'Didn't someone else do a whole album of that?"... Wilco and Billy Bragg – they made an awfully good record using his poetry. So I thought, 'Well, I don't know, that's already been done.' But she's very persistent and she sent me four or five poems and, I don't know, it took about six minutes to put that together. It just came real quick. We were making the record and I hadn't written the music yet and I was walking out to the rehearsal room, which is right next to my studio, and I didn't even make it to rehearsal room and I just turned around and played it and we went in and recorded it. That's how long it took. I think we did like two takes and that was it.” Easy Target: When debuting "Easy Target" on January 19, 2017, Mellencamp told Yahoo's Katie Couric: "I didn't even want to write the song. I know this sounds crazy, but it happens a lot, I think, to songwriters – you can't tell it by looking, but I was working out and all of a sudden I just started singing 'easy targets' and I thought, 'oh no, now I've got to stop what I'm doing' and it took me....you know, somebody just sent it to me and I just wrote it down. The melody came [intact], the