You said earlier that when people hear the drums of war they react out of fear. Were you surprised at the heights the rhetoric reached this spring?

Well, the whole thing was surreal to me. I have watched Vietnam and a bunch of other skirmishes, but I've never seen another point in time where I felt that McCarthyism was rearing its head. And that's how I felt.

But I don't feel it now. These [pro-war] people are having a hard enough time defending what they did in Iraq, they don't have time to fuck with anybody about being un-American now.

You also mentioned Fox News and the role they played during what you call that surreal period. What's your take on how they covered the war?

I did an interview two weeks ago for Fox News. They invited me to come on their national news show and talk about "Trouble No More." And I thought, well wait a minute, am I going to have to go on TV and argue with somebody and defend myself? That's not my job. I'm a singer, a songwriter, I'm not going to go on TV and debate and all that bullshit.

They said, "No, no, no. This is strictly about the record." So I said OK. So I go in there and they ask me a few questions about the record. Then all of a sudden the guy says to me, "You wrote a song that took some potshots at the president." I said, "Whoa, motherfucker! I didn't take any potshots at anybody, that's not my style. I'm not yelling from the back of the crowd or giving somebody the finger. That's not what I do." I said, "Listen, I wrote a song and got the lyrics out of any newspaper in the country." He said, "Well, you saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks." I said, "Listen, people have died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam and a bunch of little wars in between so that people will have the freedom to speak out, and then the administration gets on the news and says there's a price for freedom. Yeah, and these dead guys have already paid for it. For people to drive by those women's houses [the Dixie Chicks] and call them on the phone and threaten them is criminal. What the Dixie Chicks did was legal."

What's your take on George Bush?

Well, what I think of George Bush doesn't really matter, does it?

I think people would be interested to know.

I'm a songwriter. I kind of like the way he struts around sometimes. [Laughs.] Let's leave it at that.

There was a recent story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the gap between the facts and people's perceptions about the war, about how a majority of Americans thought Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that a large portion thinks we found the weapons of mass destruction.

There's no point in even talking about people's perceptions. I'm always amazed at what people think about me, just a dumb singer in a rock band, let alone some important topic. People are really involved, and rightfully so, in their own lives. You can't say anything negative about people not being informed, because they don't have time to be informed. It's a hard world to get a break in.

Have your politics changed much over the last 10 or 20 years?

I'm proud to say they haven't.

Do you think the country's politics have changed?

I'm un-proud to say I think they have.

Your parents were Democratic Party activists in Indiana, weren't they?

Oh, they were active locally, in our county. My mother campaigned for Bobby Kennedy. I was surrounded by Democrats. And I don't understand, in this day and age -- most people who are Republicans, they're not rich enough to be Republicans! I don't get it. My best friend is a Republican. He and I vowed a couple months ago never to talk about politics again. He's just a normal guy with a normal job and I've known him since I was 5 years old. But I just said to him, "Man, you don't have enough money to be a Republican. How can you afford this?"

When your friend Timothy White died a year ago, you said that rock 'n' roll had lost its conscience. What did you mean by that?

Tim would stand up against the record companies when he felt they needed to be stood up against. I remember one day Tim called me and said, "John, you're not going to believe what just happened. You know on your recording contract, how your songs and your albums revert back to you after 35 years?" I said yeah. "Well, they don't anymore." I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah, it was pork in some bill that just got signed." Well, come to find out they did it. But it got overturned.

One of the things I've noticed about your music videos over the years is their racial diversity. So many of them feature both black and white people, and it's unusual, in a rock video, to see black and white people side by side, especially if they're real people and not extras in a dance line. I'm assuming that's not just a coincidence.

I'll tell you, when I wrote "Peaceful World," one of the problems I had with the record company was that they didn't understand why I was even writing a song about racism in America today. I found that reaction to be awe-inspiring. That they thought there was no problem in America. What? You guys live in New York City and you don't see any race problems? Once I heard that I thought, "Oh shit. They don't like the record."

Because of the content? The lyrics?

Yeah, because it was about racism. And it mentioned being politically correct. They had a long laundry list of problems. Their complaint was, "You have this beautiful chorus ['Come on baby take a ride with me/ I'm up from Indiana down to Tennessee'], why do you have to fill the song with these things that will agitate people?" Well, that's what the song is.

Did they come around in the end?

No. That's why I left Columbia Records.

Because you didn't feel you could work with people who felt that way?

Because I always thought it wasn't the record company's job to like the song. I thought it was their job to sell them. And I just didn't see the point of me arguing with people about the material.

But the fact that the disagreement was about race relations, was that particularly upsetting? I mean, it seems to be a topic that has been running through your music for years.

Yeah, and I don't think many people get it either. I think people look at me in a different way. If Elvis Costello writes a great song, nobody is really surprised. He writes a lot of great songs. But if John Mellencamp writes a great song it's like, "Wow, what the fuck?" So I'm kind of a Hoagy Carmichael.

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