John Mellencamp Was Inspired by Shel Silverstein To Write His First No. 1 Hit, Which He Wrote as a Joke

In 1982, John Mellencamp (using the stage name John Cougar) released “Hurts So Good”. The song came four years and several singles after Mellencamp’s debut “I Need A Lover” was released in 1978.

“Hurts So Good” is on American Fool, Mellencamp’s fifth studio album. After years and years of writing songs without having any major hits, Mellencamp had no idea that it would be “Hurts So Good” that would put him on the proverbial map.

Mellencamp wrote all of the songs on American Fool, penning most of them by himself, including “Hurts So Good”. The chorus of “Hurts So Good” says, “Hurt so good / Come on baby, make it hurt so good / Sometimes love don’t feel like it should/ You make it hurt so good.” 

It was a friend of Mellencamp’s who actually suggested he write a song using “Hurt So Good” as the title.

“We thought of it as like a Shel Silverstein thing,” Mellencamp explains. “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?”

What John Mellencamp Says About the Meaning of “Hurts So Good”

Mellencamp may have started writing “Hurts So Good” as a joke. However, he quickly realized the significance of the song, especially at that point in his career.

“When I first started playing in rock bands, I didn’t realize how crude and mean other fellas could be,” Mellencamp reveals. “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.”

After “Hurts So Good”, Mellencamp went on to have several more hits, including “Jack & Diane”, the song that followed “Hurts So Good”. “Hurts So Good” became Mellencamp’s first No. 1 single on the Cash Box chart. The song also gave Mellencamp his first and only Grammy Award.

“Jack & Diane” became his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Of course, Mellencamp spent the next more than two decades releasing hit after hit. Some of Mellencamp’s other successful singles include “Small Town”, “Paper In Fire”, and “Cherry Bomb”, among others.

Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images

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