title: Princess Beatrice

text: In January 2022, it was reported that Beatrice had lost her taxpayer-funded police security in 2011, supposedly after her uncle Charles III (then Prince of Wales) intervened.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In 2006, Beatrice was briefly in a relationship with Paolo Liuzzo, an American whose previous charge for assault and battery caused controversy at the time. For ten years, until July 2016, she was in a relationship with Virgin Galactic businessman Dave Clark.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In March 2019, Beatrice attended a fundraising event at the National Portrait Gallery, London, accompanied by property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, the son of Alex Mapelli-Mozzi, a former British Olympian and descendant of the Italian nobility; the BBC describes Edoardo as "also a count", like his father; however, that title is not officially recognised in Italy or the UK. The couple are believed to have begun dating in September 2018. Together, they attended the wedding of Lady Gabriella Windsor, Beatrice's second cousin once removed.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: Princess Beatrice and Mozzi became engaged in Italy in September 2019, with their engagement formally announced by the Duke of York's Office on 26 September.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: The wedding was scheduled to take place on 29 May 2020 at the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, followed by a private reception in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, but first the reception and then the wedding itself were postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The wedding was eventually held in private on 17 July 2020, at the Royal Chapel of All Saints, Royal Lodge, Windsor, and was not publicly announced in advance. Beatrice's father walked her down the aisle. Her wedding dress was a remodelled Norman Hartnell dress that was loaned by the Queen, and she wore the Queen Mary Fringe Tiara that was also worn by the Queen at her own wedding.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: Princess Beatrice has a stepson, Christopher Woolf (born 2016), her husband's child from a relationship with architect Dara Huang. She gave birth to a daughter, Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi, on 18 September 2021 at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in Chelsea, London. With the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, the child became 10th in line to the throne.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In 2002, Beatrice visited children living with HIV in Russia. In Britain, she supported Springboard for Children (a literacy project for primary-school children with learning difficulties) and the Teenage Cancer Trust. In an interview to mark her 18th birthday, Beatrice said she wanted to use her position to assist others through charity work; she had already undertaken charitable duties alongside her mother through the various organisations the Duchess supported.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In April 2010, running to raise money for Children in Crisis, she became the first member of the royal family to complete the London Marathon. Beatrice is the patron of Forget Me Not Children's Hospice, which supports children with life-shortening conditions in West Yorkshire and North Manchester. At the April 2011 wedding of her cousin Prince William, Beatrice's unusual fascinator, designed by Philip Treacy, received much attention and derision from the public and the media. The following month, the headpiece was auctioned for £81,000 on eBay, with the proceeds going to two charities: UNICEF and Children in Crisis.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: Beatrice and the Duke of Edinburgh accompanied the Queen to the traditional Royal Maundy services on 5 April 2012 in York. There, Beatrice interacted with parishioners, received flowers from the public, and assisted the Queen as she passed out the official Maundy money to the pensioners. In the lead up to the 2012 Summer Olympics, Beatrice welcomed the Olympic flame on the steps of Harewood House near Leeds. In 2013, Beatrice and her sister promoted Britain overseas in Germany. She also visited the Isle of Wight in 2014, whose governor was Beatrice's namesake Princess Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In November 2012, Beatrice became a patron of the York Musical Society. In April 2013, she became royal patron of the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre, a charity that she credits with helping her overcome her own academic challenges resulting from dyslexia. She accompanied her father during an official engagement in the United Arab Emirates on 24 November 2014.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In 2016, Beatrice, her mother, and her sister Eugenie collaborated with British contemporary artist Teddy McDonald to create the first royal contemporary art painting. Titled "Royal Love", it was painted at Royal Lodge and exhibited at Masterpiece London before being sold with all proceeds from the sale donated by McDonald to Children in Crisis. In 2018, Children in Crisis merged with Street Child, a children's charity active in multiple countries, with Beatrice serving as its ambassador. She is also a supporter of the Pitch@Palace initiative, a charity her father founded to amplify and accelerate entrepreneurs' business ideas.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: Beatrice took part in a South Asia Tour 2016 that lasted nine days. She visited Nepal, India, and Bhutan on behalf of the Franks Family Foundation (FFF), and Jamgon Kongtrul Eyes Centres, a free micro-surgical cataract programme in technical collaboration with Nepal's Tilganga Eye Centre under Nepali eye surgeon Sanduk Ruit's direction. A few weeks later, she attended the 2016 Asia Game Changer Awards Dinner at the United Nations in New York City, which honoured Ruit and others. Beatrice and Charles Rockefeller presented Ruit with his Asia Society Asia Game Changer award.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: Beatrice is the founder of Big Change, a charity she established with six of her friends to encourage young people to develop skills "outside a traditional academic curriculum". In 2012, she climbed Mont Blanc in aid of the charity. In 2016, with Richard Branson and his children, she participated in the fundraising challenge Virgin Strive Challenge, which involved climbing Mount Etna.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In 2017, Beatrice helped promote the anti-bullying book "Be Cool Be Nice" and gave an interview to "Vogue" at a House of Lords event, speaking about her own experiences with being bullied for her fashion choices in her early adulthood. "Hello!" magazine later named her one of the best-dressed royals. In May 2018, she attended the Met Gala in New York City. In October 2018, she undertook an extended tour of Laos to "raise the profile of the UK" there, and also participated in the Luang Prabang Half Marathon for Children.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In March 2019, Beatrice was elected to the board of the UK charity the Outward Bound Trust as a trustee, after her father took over the patronage from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh. In May 2019, she was honoured at a gala in New York City for her work with Friends Without a Border. She has supported the Kairos Society, a nonprofit organisation of entrepreneurs at universities in China, Europe, India and the US.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: In April 2022 and in her capacity as an ambassador for the charity Made By Dyslexia, Beatrice and her husband took part in the first World Dyslexia Assembly, which was hosted by Prince Carl Philip in Sweden.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: On 17 September 2022, during the period of official mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, Beatrice joined her sister and six cousins to mount a 15-minute vigil around the coffin of the late Queen, as it lay in state at Westminster Hall. On 19 September, she joined other family members at the state funeral.


title: Princess Beatrice

text: As a male-line grandchild of the sovereign, Beatrice was known as "Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice of York", at birth, with the territorial designation coming from her father's title, Duke of York. Since her marriage, she has been styled "Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice, Mrs Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi" in the Court Circular.


title: Transistor

text: A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. The transistor is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an electronic circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.


title: Transistor

text: Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor in 1926, but it was not possible to actually construct a working device at that time. The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. The most widely used type of transistor is the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), which was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. Transistors revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things.


title: Transistor

text: Most transistors are made from very pure silicon, and some from germanium, but certain other semiconductor materials are sometimes used. A transistor may have only one kind of charge carrier, in a field-effect transistor, or may have two kinds of charge carriers in bipolar junction transistor devices. Compared with the vacuum tube, transistors are generally smaller and require less power to operate. Certain vacuum tubes have advantages over transistors at very high operating frequencies or high operating voltages. Many types of transistors are made to standardized specifications by multiple manufacturers.


title: Transistor

text: The thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, enabled amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a fragile device that consumed a substantial amount of power. In 1909, physicist William Eccles discovered the crystal diode oscillator. Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925, which was intended to be a solid-state replacement for the triode. Lilienfeld also filed identical patents in the United States in 1926 and 1928. However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Because the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device in Europe.


title: Transistor

text: From November 17, 1947, to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term "transistor" was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term "transresistance". According to Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, Shockley had proposed that Bell Labs' first patent for a transistor should be based on the field-effect and that he be named as the inventor. Having unearthed Lilienfeld's patents that went into obscurity years earlier, lawyers at Bell Labs advised against Shockley's proposal because the idea of a field-effect transistor that used an electric field as a "grid" was not new. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor. In acknowledgement of this accomplishment, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".


title: Transistor

text: Shockley's research team initially attempted to build a field-effect transistor (FET), by trying to modulate the conductivity of a semiconductor, but was unsuccessful, mainly due to problems with the surface states, the dangling bond, and the germanium and copper compound materials. In the course of trying to understand the mysterious reasons behind their failure to build a working FET, this led them instead to invent the bipolar point-contact and junction transistors.


title: Transistor

text: In 1948, the point-contact transistor was independently invented by German physicists Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker while working at the "Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse", a Westinghouse subsidiary located in Paris. Mataré had previous experience in developing crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium in the German radar effort during World War II. Using this knowledge, he began researching the phenomenon of "interference" in 1947. By June 1948, witnessing currents flowing through point-contacts, Mataré produced consistent results using samples of germanium produced by Welker, similar to what Bardeen and Brattain had accomplished earlier in December 1947. Realizing that Bell Labs' scientists had already invented the transistor before them, the company rushed to get its "transition" into production for amplified use in France's telephone network and filed his first transistor patent application on August 13, 1948.


title: Transistor

text: The first bipolar junction transistors were invented by Bell Labs' William Shockley, which applied for patent (2,569,347) on June 26, 1948. On April 12, 1950, Bell Labs chemists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks had successfully produced a working bipolar NPN junction amplifying germanium transistor. Bell Labs had announced the discovery of this new "sandwich" transistor in a press release on July 4, 1951.


title: Transistor

text: The first high-frequency transistor was the surface-barrier germanium transistor developed by Philco in 1953, capable of operating at frequencies up to . These were made by etching depressions into an n-type germanium base from both sides with jets of Indium(III) sulfate until it was a few ten-thousandths of an inch thick. Indium electroplated into the depressions formed the collector and emitter.


title: Transistor

text: AT&T first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in circuits of the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953 for selecting trunk circuits from routing information encoded on translator cards. The Western Electric No. 3A phototransistor read the mechanical encoding from punched metal cards.


title: Transistor

text: The first "prototype" pocket transistor radio was shown by INTERMETALL (a company founded by Herbert Mataré in 1952) at the "Internationale Funkausstellung Düsseldorf" between August 29, 1953 and September 6, 1953. The first "production" pocket transistor radio was the Regency TR-1, released in October 1954. Produced as a joint venture between the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, I.D.E.A. and Texas Instruments of Dallas Texas, the TR-1 was manufactured in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a near pocket-sized radio featuring 4 transistors and one germanium diode. The industrial design was outsourced to the Chicago firm of Painter, Teague and Petertil. It was initially released in one of six different colours: black, ivory, mandarin red, cloud grey, mahogany and olive green. Other colours were to shortly follow.


title: Transistor

text: The first "production" all-transistor car radio was developed by Chrysler and Philco corporations and it was announced in the April 28, 1955 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Chrysler had made the all-transistor car radio, Mopar model 914HR, available as an option starting in fall 1955 for its new line of 1956 Chrysler and Imperial cars which first hit the dealership showroom floors on October 21, 1955.


title: Transistor

text: The Sony TR-63, released in 1957, was the first mass-produced transistor radio, leading to the mass-market penetration of transistor radios. The TR-63 went on to sell seven million units worldwide by the mid-1960s. Sony's success with transistor radios led to transistors replacing vacuum tubes as the dominant electronic technology in the late 1950s.


title: Transistor

text: The first working silicon transistor was developed at Bell Labs on January 26, 1954, by Morris Tanenbaum. The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of Gordon Teal, an expert in growing crystals of high purity, who had previously worked at Bell Labs.


title: Transistor

text: The basic principle of the field-effect transistor (FET) was first proposed by Austrian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1926, when he filed a patent for a device similar to MESFET and in 1928 when he filed a patent for an insulated-gate field-effect transistor. The FET concept was later also theorized by German engineer Oskar Heil in the 1930s and by William Shockley in the 1940s.


title: Transistor

text: In 1945 JFET was patented by Heinrich Welker. Following Shockley's theoretical treatment on JFET in 1952, a working practical JFET was made in 1953 by George C. Dacey and Ian M. Ross.


title: Transistor

text: In 1948 Bardeen patented the progenitor of MOSFET, an insulated-gate FET (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Bardeen's patent as well as the concept of an inversion layer forms the basis of CMOS technology today.


title: Transistor

text: Semiconductor companies initially focused on junction transistors in the early years of the semiconductor industry. The junction transistor was a relatively bulky device that was difficult to mass-produce, which limited it to several specialized applications. Field-effect transistors (FETs) were theorized as potential alternatives to junction transistors, but researchers initially could not get FETs to work properly, largely due to the troublesome surface state barrier that prevented the external electric field from penetrating the material.


title: Transistor

text: In the 1950s, Egyptian engineer Mohamed Atalla investigated the surface properties of silicon semiconductors at Bell Labs, where he proposed a new method of semiconductor device fabrication, coating a silicon wafer with an insulating layer of silicon oxide so that electricity could reliably penetrate to the conducting silicon below, overcoming the surface states that prevented electricity from reaching the semiconducting layer. This is known as surface passivation, a method that became critical to the semiconductor industry as it later made possible the mass-production of silicon integrated circuits. He presented his findings in 1957. Building on his surface passivation method, he developed the metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) process. He proposed the MOS process could be used to build the first working silicon FET, which he began working on building with the help of his Korean colleague Dawon Kahng.


title: Transistor

text: The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), or "MOS transistor", was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng in 1959. The MOSFET was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. In a self-aligned CMOS process, a transistor is formed wherever the gate layer (polysilicon or metal) crosses a diffusion layer. With its high scalability, and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits, allowing the integration of more than 10,000 transistors in a single IC.


title: Transistor

text: CMOS (complementary MOS) was invented by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1963. The first report of a floating-gate MOSFET was made by Dawon Kahng and Simon Sze in 1967. A double-gate MOSFET was first demonstrated in 1984 by Electrotechnical Laboratory researchers Toshihiro Sekigawa and Yutaka Hayashi. FinFET (fin field-effect transistor), a type of 3D non-planar multi-gate MOSFET, originated from the research of Digh Hisamoto and his team at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory in 1989.


title: Transistor

text: Transistors are the key active components in practically all modern electronics. Many thus consider the transistor to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.


title: Transistor

text: The invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009. The list of IEEE Milestones also includes the inventions of the junction transistor in 1948 and the MOSFET in 1959.


title: Transistor

text: The MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, is by far the most widely used transistor, used in applications ranging from computers and electronics to communications technology such as smartphones. The MOSFET has been considered to be the most important transistor, possibly the most important invention in electronics, and the birth of modern electronics. The MOS transistor has been the fundamental building block of modern digital electronics since the late 20th century, paving the way for the digital age. The US Patent and Trademark Office calls it a "groundbreaking invention that transformed life and culture around the world". Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass-produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs. MOSFETs are the most numerously produced artificial objects ever with more than 13 sextillion manufactured by 2018.


title: Transistor

text: Although several companies each produce over a billion individually packaged (known as "discrete") MOS transistors every year, the vast majority of transistors are now produced in integrated circuits (often shortened to "IC", "microchips" or simply "chips"), along with diodes, resistors, capacitors and other electronic components, to produce complete electronic circuits. A logic gate consists of up to about twenty transistors whereas an advanced microprocessor, as of 2022, can use as many as 57 billion transistors (MOSFETs).


title: Transistor

text: The transistor's low cost, flexibility, and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device. Transistorized mechatronic circuits have replaced electromechanical devices in controlling appliances and machinery. It is often easier and cheaper to use a standard microcontroller and write a computer program to carry out a control function than to design an equivalent mechanical system to control that same function.


title: Transistor

text: A transistor can use a small signal applied between one pair of its terminals to control a much larger signal at another pair of terminals. This property is called gain. It can produce a stronger output signal, a voltage or current, which is proportional to a weaker input signal and thus, it can act as an amplifier. Alternatively, the transistor can be used to turn current on or off in a circuit as an electrically controlled switch, where the amount of current is determined by other circuit elements.


title: Transistor

text: There are two types of transistors, which have slight differences in how they are used in a circuit. A "bipolar transistor" has terminals labeled base, collector, and emitter. A small current at the base terminal (that is, flowing between the base and the emitter) can control or switch a much larger current between the collector and emitter terminals. For a "field-effect transistor", the terminals are labeled gate, source, and drain, and a voltage at the gate can control a current between source and drain.


title: Transistor

text: The image represents a typical bipolar transistor in a circuit. A charge will flow between emitter and collector terminals depending on the current in the base. Because internally the base and emitter connections behave like a semiconductor diode, a voltage drop develops between base and emitter while the base current exists. The amount of this voltage depends on the material the transistor is made from and is referred to as "V".


title: Transistor

text: Transistors are commonly used in digital circuits as electronic switches which can be either in an "on" or "off" state, both for high-power applications such as switched-mode power supplies and for low-power applications such as logic gates. Important parameters for this application include the current switched, the voltage handled, and the switching speed, characterized by the rise and fall times.


title: Transistor

text: In a switching circuit, the goal is to simulate, as near as possible, the ideal switch having the properties of an open circuit when off, the short circuit when on, and an instantaneous transition between the two states. Parameters are chosen such that the "off" output is limited to leakage currents too small to affect connected circuitry, the resistance of the transistor in the "on" state is too small to affect circuitry, and the transition between the two states is fast enough not to have a detrimental effect.


title: Transistor

text: In a grounded-emitter transistor circuit, such as the light-switch circuit shown, as the base voltage rises, the emitter and collector currents rise exponentially. The collector voltage drops because of reduced resistance from the collector to the emitter. If the voltage difference between the collector and emitter were zero (or near zero), the collector current would be limited only by the load resistance (light bulb) and the supply voltage. This is called "saturation" because the current is flowing from collector to emitter freely. When saturated, the switch is said to be "on".


title: Transistor

text: The use of bipolar transistors for switching applications requires biasing the transistor so that it operates between its cut-off region in the off-state and the saturation region ("on"). This requires sufficient base drive current. As the transistor provides current gain, it facilitates the switching of a relatively large current in the collector by a much smaller current into the base terminal. The ratio of these currents varies depending on the type of transistor, and even for a particular type, varies depending on the collector current. In the example of a light-switch circuit, as shown, the resistor is chosen to provide enough base current to ensure the transistor is saturated. The base resistor value is calculated from the supply voltage, transistor C-E junction voltage drop, collector current, and amplification factor beta.


title: Transistor

text: The common-emitter amplifier is designed so that a small change in voltage ("V") changes the small current through the base of the transistor whose current amplification combined with the properties of the circuit means that small swings in "V" produce large changes in "V".


title: Transistor

text: Various configurations of single transistor amplifiers are possible, with some providing current gain, some voltage gain, and some both.


title: Transistor

text: From mobile phones to televisions, vast numbers of products include amplifiers for sound reproduction, radio transmission, and signal processing. The first discrete-transistor audio amplifiers barely supplied a few hundred milliwatts, but power and audio fidelity gradually increased as better transistors became available and amplifier architecture evolved.


title: Transistor

text: Modern transistor audio amplifiers of up to a few hundred watts are common and relatively inexpensive.


title: Transistor

text: Before transistors were developed, vacuum (electron) tubes (or in the UK "thermionic valves" or just "valves") were the main active components in electronic equipment.


title: Transistor

text: Hence, a particular transistor may be described as "silicon, surface-mount, BJT, NPN, low-power, high-frequency switch".


title: Transistor

text: Convenient mnemonic to remember the type of transistor (represented by a electrical symbol) involves the direction of the arrow. For the BJT, on an n-p-n transistor symbol, the arrow will "Not Point iN". On a p-n-p transistor symbol, the arrow "Points iN Proudly". This however does not apply to MOSFET-based transistor symbols as the arrow is typically reversed (i.e. the arrow for the n-p-n points inside).


title: Transistor

text: The "field-effect transistor", sometimes called a "unipolar transistor", uses either electrons (in "n-channel FET") or holes (in "p-channel FET") for conduction. The four terminals of the FET are named "source", "gate", "drain", and "body" ("substrate"). On most FETs, the body is connected to the source inside the package, and this will be assumed for the following description.


title: Transistor

text: In a FET, the drain-to-source current flows via a conducting channel that connects the "source" region to the "drain" region. The conductivity is varied by the electric field that is produced when a voltage is applied between the gate and source terminals, hence the current flowing between the drain and source is controlled by the voltage applied between the gate and source. As the gate–source voltage () is increased, the drain–source current () increases exponentially for below threshold, and then at a roughly quadratic rate: (, where is the threshold voltage at which drain current begins) in the "space-charge-limited" region above threshold. A quadratic behavior is not observed in modern devices, for example, at the 65 nm technology node.


title: Transistor

text: FETs are divided into two families: "junction FET" (JFET) and "insulated gate FET" (IGFET). The IGFET is more commonly known as a "metal–oxide–semiconductor FET" (MOSFET), reflecting its original construction from layers of metal (the gate), oxide (the insulation), and semiconductor. Unlike IGFETs, the JFET gate forms a p–n diode with the channel which lies between the source and drains. Functionally, this makes the n-channel JFET the solid-state equivalent of the vacuum tube triode which, similarly, forms a diode between its grid and cathode. Also, both devices operate in the "depletion-mode", they both have a high input impedance, and they both conduct current under the control of an input voltage.


title: Transistor

text: Metal–semiconductor FETs (MESFETs) are JFETs in which the reverse biased p–n junction is replaced by a metal–semiconductor junction. These, and the HEMTs (high-electron-mobility transistors, or HFETs), in which a two-dimensional electron gas with very high carrier mobility is used for charge transport, are especially suitable for use at very high frequencies (several GHz).


title: Transistor

text: FETs are further divided into "depletion-mode" and "enhancement-mode" types, depending on whether the channel is turned on or off with zero gate-to-source voltage. For enhancement mode, the channel is off at zero bias, and a gate potential can "enhance" the conduction. For the depletion mode, the channel is on at zero bias, and a gate potential (of the opposite polarity) can "deplete" the channel, reducing conduction. For either mode, a more positive gate voltage corresponds to a higher current for n-channel devices and a lower current for p-channel devices. Nearly all JFETs are depletion-mode because the diode junctions would forward bias and conduct if they were enhancement-mode devices, while most IGFETs are enhancement-mode types.


title: Transistor

text: The metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET), also known as the metal–oxide–silicon transistor (MOS transistor, or MOS), is a type of field-effect transistor that is fabricated by the controlled oxidation of a semiconductor, typically silicon. It has an insulated gate, whose voltage determines the conductivity of the device. This ability to change conductivity with the amount of applied voltage can be used for amplifying or switching electronic signals. The MOSFET is by far the most common transistor, and the basic building block of most modern electronics. The MOSFET accounts for 99.9% of all transistors in the world.


title: Transistor

text: Bipolar transistors are so named because they conduct by using both majority and minority carriers. The bipolar junction transistor, the first type of transistor to be mass-produced, is a combination of two junction diodes and is formed of either a thin layer of p-type semiconductor sandwiched between two n-type semiconductors (an n–p–n transistor), or a thin layer of n-type semiconductor sandwiched between two p-type semiconductors (a p–n–p transistor). This construction produces two p–n junctions: a base-emitter junction and a base-collector junction, separated by a thin region of semiconductor known as the base region. (Two junction diodes wired together without sharing an intervening semiconducting region will not make a transistor).


title: Transistor

text: BJTs have three terminals, corresponding to the three layers of semiconductor—an "emitter", a "base", and a "collector". They are useful in amplifiers because the currents at the emitter and collector are controllable by a relatively small base current. In an n–p–n transistor operating in the active region, the emitter-base junction is forward biased (electrons and holes recombine at the junction), and the base-collector junction is reverse biased (electrons and holes are formed at, and move away from the junction), and electrons are injected into the base region. Because the base is narrow, most of these electrons will diffuse into the reverse-biased base-collector junction and be swept into the collector; perhaps one-hundredth of the electrons will recombine in the base, which is the dominant mechanism in the base current. As well, as the base is lightly doped (in comparison to the emitter and collector regions), recombination rates are low, permitting more carriers to diffuse across the base region. By controlling the number of electrons that can leave the base, the number of electrons entering the collector can be controlled. Collector current is approximately β (common-emitter current gain) times the base current. It is typically greater than 100 for small-signal transistors but can be smaller in transistors designed for high-power applications.


title: Transistor

text: Unlike the field-effect transistor (see below), the BJT is a low-input-impedance device. Also, as the base-emitter voltage ("V") is increased the base-emitter current and hence the collector-emitter current ("I") increase exponentially according to the Shockley diode model and the Ebers-Moll model. Because of this exponential relationship, the BJT has a higher transconductance than the FET.


title: Transistor

text: Bipolar transistors can be made to conduct by exposure to light because the absorption of photons in the base region generates a photocurrent that acts as a base current; the collector current is approximately β times the photocurrent. Devices designed for this purpose have a transparent window in the package and are called phototransistors.


title: Transistor

text: The MOSFET is by far the most widely used transistor for both digital circuits as well as analog circuits, accounting for 99.9% of all transistors in the world. The bipolar junction transistor (BJT) was previously the most commonly used transistor during the 1950s to 1960s. Even after MOSFETs became widely available in the 1970s, the BJT remained the transistor of choice for many analog circuits such as amplifiers because of their greater linearity, up until MOSFET devices (such as power MOSFETs, LDMOS and RF CMOS) replaced them for most power electronic applications in the 1980s. In integrated circuits, the desirable properties of MOSFETs allowed them to capture nearly all market share for digital circuits in the 1970s. Discrete MOSFETs (typically power MOSFETs) can be applied in transistor applications, including analog circuits, voltage regulators, amplifiers, power transmitters, and motor drivers.


title: Transistor

text: Three major identification standards are used for designating transistor devices. In each, the alphanumeric prefix provides clues to the type of the device.


title: Transistor

text: The JEDEC part numbering scheme evolved in the 1960s in the United States. The JEDEC "EIA-370" transistor device numbers usually start with "2N", indicating a three-terminal device. Dual-gate field-effect transistors are four-terminal devices, and begin with 3N. The prefix is followed by a two-, three- or four-digit number with no significance as to device properties, although early devices with low numbers tend to be germanium devices. For example, 2N3055 is a silicon n–p–n power transistor, 2N1301 is a p–n–p germanium switching transistor. A letter suffix, such as "A", is sometimes used to indicate a newer variant, but rarely gain groupings.


title: Transistor

text: In Japan, the JIS semiconductor designation (|JIS-C-7012), labels transistor devices starting with "2S", e.g., 2SD965, but sometimes the "2S" prefix is not marked on the package–a 2SD965 might only be marked "D965" and a 2SC1815 might be listed by a supplier as simply "C1815". This series sometimes has suffixes, such as "R", "O", "BL", standing for "red", "orange", "blue", etc., to denote variants, such as tighter "h" (gain) groupings.


title: Transistor

text: The European Electronic Component Manufacturers Association (EECA) uses a numbering scheme that was inherited from Pro Electron when it merged with EECA in 1983. This scheme begins with two letters: the first gives the semiconductor type (A for germanium, B for silicon, and C for materials like GaAs); the second letter denotes the intended use (A for diode, C for general-purpose transistor, etc.). A three-digit sequence number (or one letter and two digits, for industrial types) follows. With early devices this indicated the case type. Suffixes may be used, with a letter (e.g. "C" often means high "h", such as in: BC549C) or other codes may follow to show gain (e.g. BC327-25) or voltage rating (e.g. BUK854-800A). The more common prefixes are:


title: Transistor

text: Manufacturers of devices may have their proprietary numbering system, for example CK722. Since devices are second-sourced, a manufacturer's prefix (like "MPF" in MPF102, which originally would denote a Motorola FET) now is an unreliable indicator of who made the device. Some proprietary naming schemes adopt parts of other naming schemes, for example, a PN2222A is a (possibly Fairchild Semiconductor) 2N2222A in a plastic case (but a PN108 is a plastic version of a BC108, not a 2N108, while the PN100 is unrelated to other xx100 devices).


title: Transistor

text: Military part numbers sometimes are assigned their codes, such as the British Military CV Naming System.


title: Transistor

text: Manufacturers buying large numbers of similar parts may have them supplied with "house numbers", identifying a particular purchasing specification and not necessarily a device with a standardized registered number. For example, an HP part 1854,0053 is a (JEDEC) 2N2218 transistor which is also assigned the CV number: CV7763


title: Transistor

text: With so many independent naming schemes, and the abbreviation of part numbers when printed on the devices, ambiguity sometimes occurs. For example, two different devices may be marked "J176" (one the J176 low-power JFET, the other the higher-powered MOSFET 2SJ176).


title: Transistor

text: As older "through-hole" transistors are given surface-mount packaged counterparts, they tend to be assigned many different part numbers because manufacturers have their systems to cope with the variety in pinout arrangements and options for dual or matched n–p–n + p–n–p devices in one pack. So even when the original device (such as a 2N3904) may have been assigned by a standards authority, and well known by engineers over the years, the new versions are far from standardized in their naming.


title: Transistor

text: The first BJTs were made from germanium (Ge). Silicon (Si) types currently predominate but certain advanced microwave and high-performance versions now employ the "compound semiconductor" material gallium arsenide (GaAs) and the "semiconductor alloy" silicon-germanium (SiGe). Single element semiconductor material (Ge and Si) is described as "elemental".


title: Transistor

text: Rough parameters for the most common semiconductor materials used to make transistors are given in the adjacent table. These parameters will vary with an increase in temperature, electric field, impurity level, strain, and sundry other factors.


title: Transistor

text: The "junction forward voltage" is the voltage applied to the emitter-base junction of a BJT to make the base conduct a specified current. The current increases exponentially as the junction forward voltage is increased. The values given in the table are typical for a current of 1 mA (the same values apply to semiconductor diodes). The lower the junction forward voltage the better, as this means that less power is required to "drive" the transistor. The junction forward voltage for a given current decreases with an increase in temperature. For a typical silicon junction, the change is −2.1 mV/°C. In some circuits special compensating elements (sensistors) must be used to compensate for such changes.


title: Transistor

text: The density of mobile carriers in the channel of a MOSFET is a function of the electric field forming the channel and of various other phenomena such as the impurity level in the channel. Some impurities, called dopants, are introduced deliberately in making a MOSFET, to control the MOSFET electrical behavior.


title: Transistor

text: The "electron mobility" and "hole mobility" columns show the average speed that electrons and holes diffuse through the semiconductor material with an electric field of 1 volt per meter applied across the material. In general, the higher the electron mobility the faster the transistor can operate. The table indicates that Ge is a better material than Si in this respect. However, Ge has four major shortcomings compared to silicon and gallium arsenide:


title: Transistor

text: Because the electron mobility is higher than the hole mobility for all semiconductor materials, a given bipolar n–p–n transistor tends to be swifter than an equivalent p–n–p transistor. GaAs has the highest electron mobility of the three semiconductors. It is for this reason that GaAs is used in high-frequency applications. A relatively recent FET development, the "high-electron-mobility transistor" (HEMT), has a heterostructure (junction between different semiconductor materials) of aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs)-gallium arsenide (GaAs) which has twice the electron mobility of a GaAs-metal barrier junction. Because of their high speed and low noise, HEMTs are used in satellite receivers working at frequencies around 12 GHz. HEMTs based on gallium nitride and aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN/GaN HEMTs) provide still higher electron mobility and are being developed for various applications.


title: Transistor

text: Maximum junction temperature values represent a cross-section taken from various manufacturers' datasheets. This temperature should not be exceeded or the transistor may be damaged.


title: Transistor

text: "Al–Si junction" refers to the high-speed (aluminum-silicon) metal–semiconductor barrier diode, commonly known as a Schottky diode. This is included in the table because some silicon power IGFETs have a parasitic reverse Schottky diode formed between the source and drain as part of the fabrication process. This diode can be a nuisance, but sometimes it is used in the circuit.


title: Transistor

text: Transistors come in many different semiconductor packages (see image). The two main categories are "through-hole" (or "leaded"), and "surface-mount", also known as "surface-mount device" (SMD). The "ball grid array" (BGA) is the latest surface-mount package. It has solder "balls" on the underside in place of leads. Because they are smaller and have shorter interconnections, SMDs have better high-frequency characteristics but lower power ratings.


title: Transistor

text: Transistor packages are made of glass, metal, ceramic, or plastic. The package often dictates the power rating and frequency characteristics. Power transistors have larger packages that can be clamped to heat sinks for enhanced cooling. Additionally, most power transistors have the collector or drain physically connected to the metal enclosure. At the other extreme, some surface-mount "microwave" transistors are as small as grains of sand.


title: Transistor

text: Often a given transistor type is available in several packages. Transistor packages are mainly standardized, but the assignment of a transistor's functions to the terminals is not: other transistor types can assign other functions to the package's terminals. Even for the same transistor type the terminal assignment can vary (normally indicated by a suffix letter to the part number, q.e. BC212L and BC212K).


title: Transistor

text: Nowadays most transistors come in a wide range of SMT packages, in comparison, the list of available through-hole packages is relatively small, here is a shortlist of the most common through-hole transistors packages in alphabetical order:


title: Transistor

text: ATV, E-line, MRT, HRT, SC-43, SC-72, TO-3, TO-18, TO-39, TO-92, TO-126, TO220, TO247, TO251, TO262, ZTX851.


title: Transistor

text: Unpackaged transistor chips (die) may be assembled into hybrid devices. The IBM SLT module of the 1960s is one example of such a hybrid circuit module using glass passivated transistor (and diode) die. Other packaging techniques for discrete transistors as chips include "direct chip attach" (DCA) and "chip-on-board" (COB).


title: Transistor

text: Researchers have made several kinds of flexible transistors, including organic field-effect transistors. Flexible transistors are useful in some kinds of flexible displays and other flexible electronics.


title: John Mellencamp

text: John J. Mellencamp (born October 7, 1951), previously known as Johnny Cougar, John Cougar, and John Cougar Mellencamp, is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for his catchy brand of heartland rock, which emphasizes traditional instrumentation.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp rose to fame in the 1980s while "honing an almost startlingly plainspoken writing style" that, starting in 1982, yielded a string of Top 10 singles, including "Hurts So Good", "Jack & Diane", "Crumblin' Down", "Pink Houses", "Lonely Ol' Night", "Small Town", "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.", "Paper in Fire", and "Cherry Bomb". He has amassed 22 Top 40 hits in the United States. In addition, he holds the record for the most tracks by a solo artist to hit number one on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, with seven. Mellencamp has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning one. His latest album of original songs, "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack", was released on January 21, 2022. Mellencamp has sold over 30 million albums in the US and over 60 million worldwide.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp is also one of the founding members of Farm Aid, an organization that began in 1985 with a concert in Champaign, Illinois, to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land. Farm Aid concerts have remained an annual event over the past 37 years, and the organization has raised over $60 million.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Indiana, on October 7, 1951. He is of German ancestry. He was born with spina bifida, for which he had corrective surgery as an infant. Mellencamp formed his first band, Crepe Soul, at the age of 14.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp attended Vincennes University, a two-year college in Vincennes, Indiana, starting in 1972. During this time he abused drugs and alcohol, stating in a 1986 "Rolling Stone" interview, "When I was high on pot, it affected me so drastically that when I was in college there were times when I wouldn't get off the couch. I would lie there, listening to Roxy Music, right next to the record player so I wouldn't have to get up to flip the record over. I'd listen to this record, that record. There would be four or five days like that when I would be completely gone."


title: John Mellencamp

text: During his college years, Mellencamp played in several local bands, including the glitter-band Trash, which was named for a New York Dolls song, and he later got a job in Seymour installing telephones. During this period, Mellencamp, who had given up drugs and alcohol before graduating from college, decided to pursue a career in music and traveled to New York City in an attempt to land a record contract.


title: John Mellencamp

text: After 18 months of traveling between Indiana and New York City in 1974 and 1975, Mellencamp found someone receptive to his music and image in Tony DeFries of MainMan Management. DeFries insisted that Mellencamp's first album, "Chestnut Street Incident", a collection of covers and a handful of original songs, be released under the stage name Johnny Cougar, insisting that the bumpy German name "Mellencamp" was too hard to market. Mellencamp reluctantly agreed, but the album was a commercial failure, selling only 12,000 copies. Mellencamp confessed in a 2005 interview: "That [name] was put on me by some manager. I went to New York and everybody said, 'You sound like a hillbilly.' And I said, 'Well, I am.' So that's where he came up with that name. I was totally unaware of it until it showed up on the album jacket. When I objected to it, he said, 'Well, either you're going to go for it, or we're not going to put the record out.' So that was what I had to do... but I thought the name was pretty silly."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp recorded "The Kid Inside", the follow-up to "Chestnut Street Incident", in 1977, but DeFries eventually decided against releasing the album, and Mellencamp was dropped from MCA records (DeFries finally released "The Kid Inside" in early 1983, after Mellencamp achieved stardom). Mellencamp drew interest from Rod Stewart's manager, Billy Gaff, after parting ways with DeFries and was signed onto the small Riva Records label. At Gaff's request, Mellencamp moved to London, England, for nearly a year to record, promote, and tour behind 1978's "A Biography". The record wasn't released in the United States, but it yielded a top-five hit in Australia with "I Need a Lover". Riva Records added "I Need a Lover" to Mellencamp's next album released in the United States, 1979's "John Cougar", where the song became a No. 28 single in late 1979. Pat Benatar recorded "I Need a Lover" on her debut album "In the Heat of the Night".


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1980, Mellencamp returned with the Steve Cropper-produced "Nothin' Matters and What If It Did", which yielded two Top 40 singles – "This Time" (No. 27) and "Ain't Even Done With the Night" (No. 17). "The singles were stupid little pop songs," he told "Record Magazine" in 1983. "I take no credit for that record. It wasn't like the title was made up – it wasn't supposed to be punky or cocky like some people thought. Toward the end, I didn't even go to the studio. Me and the guys in the band thought we were finished, anyway. It was the most expensive record I ever made. It cost $280,000, do you believe that? The worst thing was that I could have gone on making records like that for hundreds of years. Hell, as long as you sell a few records and the record company isn't putting a lot of money into promotion, you're making money for 'em and that's all they care about. PolyGram loved "Nothin' Matters". They thought I was going to turn into the next Neil Diamond."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1982, Mellencamp released his breakthrough album, "American Fool", which contained the singles "Hurts So Good", an uptempo rock tune that spent four weeks at No. 2 and 16 weeks in the top 10, and "Jack & Diane", which was a No. 1 hit for four weeks. A third single, "Hand to Hold on To", made it to No. 19. "Hurts So Good" went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 25th Grammys. "To be real honest, there's three good songs on that record, and the rest is just sort of filler," Mellencamp told "Creem Magazine" of "American Fool" in 1984. "It was too labored over, too thought about, and it wasn't organic enough. The record company thought it would bomb, but I think the reason it took off was – not that the songs were better than my others – but people liked the sound of it, the 'bam-bam-bam' drums. It was a different sound."


title: John Mellencamp

text: With some commercial success under his belt, Mellencamp had enough clout to force the record company to add his real surname, Mellencamp, to his stage moniker. The first album recorded under his new name John Cougar Mellencamp was 1983's "Uh-Huh", a Top-10 album that spawned the Top 10 singles "Pink Houses" and "Crumblin' Down" as well as the No. 15 hit "Authority Song", which he said is "our version of "I Fought the Law'." During the recording of "Uh-Huh", Mellencamp's backing band settled on the lineup it retained for the next several albums: Kenny Aronoff on drums and percussion, Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic on guitars, Toby Myers on bass and John Cascella on keyboards. In 1988, "Rolling Stone" magazine called this version of Mellencamp's band "one of the most powerful and versatile live bands ever assembled." On the 1984 Uh-Huh Tour, Mellencamp opened his shows with cover versions of songs he admired growing up, including Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel", the Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", Lee Dorsey's "Ya Ya", and the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina".


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1985, Mellencamp released "Scarecrow", which peaked at No. 2 in the fall of 1985 and spawned five Top 40 singles: "Lonely Ol' Night" and "Small Town" (both No. 6), "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to '60s Rock)" (No. 2), "Rain on the Scarecrow" (No. 21) and "Rumble Seat" (No. 28). According to the February 1986 edition of "Creem Magazine", Mellencamp wanted to incorporate the sound of classic '60s rock into "Scarecrow", and he gave his band close to a hundred old singles to learn "almost mathematically verbatim" prior to recording the album.


title: John Mellencamp

text: "Learning those songs did a lot of positive things," Mellencamp explained to "Creem" writer Bill Holdship. "We realized more than ever what a big melting pot of all different types of music the '60s were. Take an old Rascals song for example – there's everything from marching band beats to soul music to country sounds in one song. Learning those opened the band's vision to try new things on my songs. It wasn't let's go back and try to make this part fit into my song, but I wanted to capture the same feeling – the way those songs used to make you feel. After a while, we didn't even have to talk about it anymore. If you listen to the lead Larry [Crane] plays on 'Face of the Nation,' he never would have played that 'cause he didn't really know who the Animals were. He's young, and he grew up listening to Grand Funk Railroad. You hear it, and it's like 'where did that come from?' It had to be from hearing those old records."


title: John Mellencamp

text: "Scarecrow" was the first album Mellencamp recorded at his own recording studio, jokingly dubbed "Belmont Mall", located in Belmont, Indiana and built in 1984. Mellencamp sees "Scarecrow" as the start of the alternative country genre: "I think I invented that whole 'No Depression' thing with the "Scarecrow" album, though I don't get the credit," he told "Classic Rock" magazine in October 2008.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In the liner notes to Mellencamp’s 2010 box set "On the Rural Route 7609", Anthony DeCurtis wrote of Mellencamp’s influence on the No Depression movement:


title: John Mellencamp

text: Shortly after finishing "Scarecrow", Mellencamp helped organize the first Farm Aid benefit concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young in Champaign, Illinois on September 22, 1985. The Farm Aid concerts remain an annual event and have raised over $60 million for struggling family farmers .


title: John Mellencamp

text: Prior to the 1985–86 Scarecrow Tour, during which he covered some of the same 1960s rock and soul songs he and his band rehearsed prior to the recording of "Scarecrow", Mellencamp added fiddle player Lisa Germano to his band. Germano would remain in Mellencamp's band until 1994, when she left to pursue a solo career.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's next studio album, 1987's "The Lonesome Jubilee", included the singles "Paper in Fire" (No. 9), "Cherry Bomb" (No. 8), "Check It Out" (No. 14), and "Rooty Toot Toot" (No. 61) along with the popular album tracks "Hard Times for an Honest Man" and "The Real Life", both of which cracked the top 10 on the "Billboard" Album Rock Tracks chart. "We were on the road for a long time after "Scarecrow", so we were together a lot as a band," Mellencamp said in a 1987 "Creem Magazine" feature. "For the first time ever, we talked about the record before we started. We had a very distinct vision of what should be happening here. At one point, "The Lonesome Jubilee" was supposed to be a double album, but at least 10 of the songs I'd written just didn't stick together with the idea and the sound we had in mind. So I just put those songs on a shelf, and cut it back down to a single record. Now, in the past, it was always 'Let's make it up as we go along' – and we did make some of "The Lonesome Jubilee" up as we went along. But we had a very clear idea of what we wanted it to sound like, even before it was written, right through to the day it was mastered."


title: John Mellencamp

text: As Frank DiGiacomo of "Vanity Fair" wrote in 2007, ""The Lonesome Jubilee" was the album in which Mellencamp defined his now signature sound: a rousing, crystalline mix of acoustic and electric guitars, Appalachian fiddle, and gospel-style backing vocals, anchored by a crisp, bare-knuckle drumbeat and completed by his own velveteen rasp."


title: John Mellencamp

text: During the 1987–88 Lonesome Jubilee Tour, Mellencamp was joined onstage by surprise guest Bruce Springsteen at the end of his May 26, 1988, gig in Irvine, California, for a duet of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", which Mellencamp performed as the penultimate song during each show on that tour. Said Mellencamp of his band during the 1987-88 Lonesome Jubilee Tour:


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1989, Mellencamp released the personal album "Big Daddy", with the key tracks "Jackie Brown", "Big Daddy of Them All", and "Void in My Heart" accompanying the Top 15 single "Pop Singer". The album, which Mellencamp called at the time the most "earthy" record he'd ever made, is also the last to feature the "Cougar" moniker. In 1991, Mellencamp said: "'Big Daddy' was the best record I ever made. Out of my agony came a couple of really beautiful songs. You can't be 22 years old and had two dates and understand that album."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp was heavily involved in painting at this time in his life and decided not to tour behind "Big Daddy", stating: "What's the point?... This other step that people keep wanting me to take to become another level of recording artist – to be Madonna? To sell out? To bend over? To kiss somebody's ass? I ain't gonna do it." In his second painting exhibition, at the Churchman-Fehsenfeld Gallery in Indianapolis in 1990, Mellencamp's portraits were described as always having sad facial expressions and conveying "the same disillusionment found in his musical anthems about the nation's heartland and farm crisis."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's 1991 album, "Whenever We Wanted", was the first with a cover billed to John Mellencamp; the "Cougar" was finally dropped for good. "Whenever We Wanted" yielded the Top 40 hits "Get a Leg Up" and "Again Tonight", but "Last Chance", "Love and Happiness" and "Now More Than Ever" all garnered significant airplay on rock radio. "It's very rock 'n' roll", Mellencamp said of "Whenever We Wanted": "I just wanted to get back to the basics."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1993, he released "Human Wheels", and the title track peaked at No. 48 on the "Billboard" singles chart. "To me, this record is very urban," Mellencamp told Billboard magazine of "Human Wheels" in the summer of 1993. "We had a lot of discussions about the rhythm and blues music of the day. We explored what a lot of these (current) bands are doing – these young black bands that are doing more than just sampling."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's 1994 "Dance Naked" album included a cover of Van Morrison's "Wild Night" as a duet with Meshell Ndegeocello. "Wild Night" became Mellencamp's biggest hit in years, peaking at No. 3 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. The album also contained two protest songs in "L.U.V." and "Another Sunny Day 12/25", in addition to the title track, which hit No. 41 on the Hot 100 in the summer of 1994. "This is as naked a rock record as you're going to hear," Mellencamp said of "Dance Naked" in a 1994 "Billboard" magazine interview. "All the vocals are first or second takes, and half the songs don't even have bass parts. Others have just one guitar, bass, and drums, which I haven't done since "American Fool"."


title: John Mellencamp

text: With guitarist Andy York now on board as Larry Crane's full-time replacement, Mellencamp launched his Dance Naked Tour in the summer of 1994, but had a minor heart attack after a show at Jones Beach in New York on August 8 of that year. That heart attack eventually forced him to cancel the last few weeks of the tour. He returned to the concert stage in early 1995 by playing a series of dates in small Midwestern clubs under the pseudonym Pearl Doggy.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On November 19, 1994 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Mellencamp performed an acoustic cover of Billy Joel's "Allentown" at a tribute event to Billy Joel.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In September 1996, the experimental album "Mr. Happy Go Lucky", which was produced by Junior Vasquez, was released to critical acclaim. "It's been fascinating to me how urban records use rhythm and electronics, and it's terribly challenging to make that work in the context of a rock band", Mellencamp told "Billboard" magazine in 1996. "But we took it further than an urban record. The arrangements are more ambitious, with programs and loops going right along with real drums and guitars."


title: John Mellencamp

text: "Mr. Happy Go Lucky" spawned the No. 14 single "Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)" (Mellencamp's last Top 40 hit) and "Just Another Day", which peaked at No. 46.


title: John Mellencamp

text: After the release of "Mr. Happy Go Lucky" and a subsequent four-month tour from March to July 1997 to promote it, Mellencamp signed a four-album deal with Columbia Records, although he wound up making only three albums for the label.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Issued a day before his 47th birthday in 1998, his self-titled debut for Columbia Records included the singles "Your Life Is Now" and "I'm Not Running Anymore", along with standout album tracks such as "Eden Is Burning", "Miss Missy", "It All Comes True" and "Chance Meeting at the Tarantula". The switch in labels coincided with Dane Clark replacing Aronoff on drums. "On this record, we ended up quite a bit away from where we started", Mellencamp told Guitar World Acoustic in 1998. "Initially, I wanted to make a record that barely had drums on it. Donovan made a record (in 1966), "Sunshine Superman", and I wanted to start with that same kind of vibe—Eastern, very grand stories, fairy tales."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 1999, Mellencamp covered his own songs as well as those by Bob Dylan and the Drifters for his album "Rough Harvest" (recorded in 1997), one of two albums he owed Mercury Records to fulfill his contract (the other was "The Best That I Could Do", a best-of collection). In May 2000, he gave the Indiana University commencement address, in which he advised graduates to "play it like you feel it!" and that "you'll be all right". Following the delivery of his address, Indiana University bestowed upon him an honorary Doctorate of Musical Arts.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In August 2000, Mellencamp played a series of unannounced free concerts in major cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest as a way of giving back to fans who had supported him the previous 24 years. With a lo-fi setup that included portable amps and a battery-powered P.A. system, Mellencamp, armed with an acoustic guitar and accompanied only by an accordionist and a violist, dubbed the jaunt "Live in the Streets: The Good Samaritan Tour". At these dozen shows, which ranged in length from 45 to 60 minutes, Mellencamp covered a number of rock and folk classics and sprinkled in a few of his own songs. "Nobody's selling anything, there's no souvenirs—except what's in everybody's heart", Mellencamp told "Billboard" magazine. "Think about it: Isn't that where music started? To anybody who's said thank you to me, I say, 'You're very nice, but, really, thank you.'" (In 2021, Mellencamp would partner with Turner Classic Movies to release a documentary of the tour on YouTube.)


title: John Mellencamp

text: The early 21st century also found Mellencamp teaming up with artists such as Chuck D and India.Arie to deliver his second Columbia album, "Cuttin' Heads" and the single "Peaceful World". "Cuttin' Heads" also included a duet with Trisha Yearwood on a love song called "Deep Blue Heart". "He played me this song", Yearwood told Country.com, "and he said, 'I kind of have an idea of like when Emmylou Harris sang on Bob Dylan's record, just kind of harmony all the way through.'"


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp embarked on the Cuttin' Heads Tour in the summer of 2001, before the album was even released. He opened each show on this tour with a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and also played a solo acoustic version of the "Cuttin' Heads" track "Women Seem" at each show.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In October 2002, Mellencamp performed the Robert Johnson song "Stones in My Passway" at two benefit concerts for his friend, "Billboard" magazine editor-in-chief Timothy White, who died from a heart attack in 2002.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Columbia Records executives, who were in attendance at the benefit shows, were so impressed with Mellencamp's live renditions of "Stones in My Passway" that they convinced him to record an album of vintage American songs, which ultimately became "Trouble No More". The album was a quickly recorded collection of folk and blues covers originally done by artists such as Robert Johnson, Son House, Lucinda Williams and Hoagy Carmichael. "Trouble No More" was released in 2003, dedicated to Mellencamp's friend Timothy White, and spent several weeks at No. 1 on "Billboard"s Blues Album charts. Mellencamp sang the gospel song "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" at White's funeral on July 2, 2002.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp participated in the Vote for Change tour in October 2004 leading up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. That same month he released the two-disc career hits retrospective "", which contained 35 of his radio singles (including all 22 of his Top 40 hits) along with two new tunes, "Walk Tall" and "Thank You" – both produced by Babyface but written by Mellencamp.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In 2005, Mellencamp toured with Donovan and John Fogerty. The first leg of what was called the Words and Music Tour in the spring of 2005 featured Donovan playing in the middle of Mellencamp's set. Mellencamp would play a handful of songs before introducing Donovan and then duetting with him on the 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman". Mellencamp would leave the stage as Donovan played seven or eight of his songs (backed by Mellencamp's band) and then return to finish off his own set after Donovan departed. On the second leg of the tour in the summer of 2005, Fogerty co-headlined with Mellencamp at outdoor amphitheaters across the United States. Fogerty would join Mellencamp for duets on Fogerty's Creedence Clearwater Revival hit "Green River" and Mellencamp's "Rain on the Scarecrow".


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp released "Freedom's Road", his first album of original material in over five years, on January 23, 2007. He intended for "Freedom's Road" to have a 1960s rock sound while still remaining contemporary, and he feels that goal was achieved. "We wanted to make sure that it had the same feeling of some of the great songs from the '60s but also had the message of today and had the backbeat of today. I think we came up with a pretty timeless sounding album", Mellencamp told his online radio station in late 2006. "Our Country", the first single from "Freedom's Road", was played as the opening song on Mellencamp's 2006 spring tour, and the band that opened for him on that tour, Little Big Town, was called on to record harmonies on the studio version of "Our Country", as well as seven other songs on "Freedom's Road".


title: John Mellencamp

text: Although Mellencamp had always been outspoken and adamant about not selling any of his songs to corporations to use in commercials, he changed his stance and let Chevrolet use "Our Country" in Chevy Silverado TV commercials that began airing in late September 2006. "I agonized", Mellencamp told "USA Today"s Edna Gundersen in 2007 over his decision to license "Our Country" to Chevrolet. "I still don't think we should have to do it, but record companies can't spend money to promote records anymore, unless you're U2 or Madonna. I'm taking heat because no one's ever done this before. People have licensed songs that have already been hits, but nobody's licensed a brand-new song to a major company, and people don't know how to react."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp sang "Our Country" to open Game 2 of the 2006 World Series, and the song was nominated for a 2008 Grammy Award in the Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance category, but lost to Bruce Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere". "Freedom's Road" peaked at No. 5 on the "Billboard" 200 album chart by selling 56,000 copies in its first week on the market.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On August 13, 2007, Mellencamp began recording his 18th album of original material, titled "Life, Death, Love and Freedom". The album, which was released on July 15, 2008, was produced by T Bone Burnett. The first song with video, "Jena", was introduced on Mellencamp's website in October 2007. In an interview with the "Bloomington Herald-Times" in March 2008, Mellencamp dubbed "Life, Death, Love and Freedom" "The best record I've ever made." He signed with Starbucks' Hear Music label to distribute the album and said, "they think it's a fucking masterpiece". The album's first single was "My Sweet Love". A video for the song was filmed in Savannah, Georgia on June 9, 2008. Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town is featured in the video. She harmonizes with Mellencamp on "My Sweet Love" and provides background vocals to three other songs on "Life, Death, Love and Freedom", which became the ninth Top 10 album of Mellencamp's career when it debuted at No. 7 on the "Billboard" 200 the week of August 2, 2008. Like "Freedom's Road", "Life, Death, Love and Freedom" also sold 56,000 copies in its first week. In its list of the 50 best albums of 2008, "Rolling Stone" magazine named "Life, Death, Love and Freedom" No. 5 overall and also dubbed "Troubled Land" No. 48 among the 100 best singles of the year.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On September 23, 2008, Mellencamp filmed a concert at the Crump Theatre in Columbus, Indiana for a new A&E Biography series called "Homeward Bound". The show featured performers returning to small venues where they performed during the early stages of their careers. The program aired on December 11, 2008, and also featured an in-depth documentary tracing Mellencamp's roots.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp participated in a tribute concert for Pete Seeger's 90th birthday on May 3, 2009, at Madison Square Garden in New York City which raised funds for an environmental organization founded by Seeger to preserve and protect the Hudson River. Mellencamp performed solo acoustic renditions of Seeger and Lee Hays' "If I Had a Hammer" and his own "A Ride Back Home."


title: John Mellencamp

text: While he was on tour, Mellencamp recorded a new album titled "No Better Than This" that was again produced by T Bone Burnett. The tracks for the album were recorded at historic locations, such as the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia as well as at the Sun Studio in Memphis and the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio where blues pioneer Robert Johnson recorded "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Crossroad Blues". Mellencamp recorded the album using a 1955 Ampex portable recording machine and only one microphone, requiring all the musicians to gather together around the mic. The album was recorded in mono. Mellencamp wrote over 30 songs for the record (only 13 made the final cut), and he wrote one song specifically for Room 414 at the Gunter Hotel Mellencamp told the "San Antonio Express-News": "No Better Than This" was released on August 17, 2010, and peaked at No. 10 on the "Billboard" 200, becoming the 10th Top 10 album of his career. "No Better Than This" is the first mono-only release to make the top 10 since James Brown's "Pure Dynamite! Live at the Royal", which peaked at No. 10 in April 1964.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On December 6, 2009, Mellencamp performed "Born in the U.S.A." as a tribute to Bruce Springsteen, who was one of the honorees at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. "I was very proud and humbled to have been able to play 'Born in the U.S.A.' in a different fashion that I think was true to the feelings that Bruce had when he wrote it", Mellencamp said. He performed "Down by the River" on January 29, 2010, in Los Angeles in tribute to Neil Young, who was honored at the 20th annual MusiCares Person of the Year gala. Mellencamp sang the hymn "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" at "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement" on February 9, 2010.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp, who co-headlined 11 shows in the summer of 2010 with Bob Dylan, launched the "No Better Than This" theater tour on October 29, 2010, in Bloomington, Indiana. On this tour, which ran through the summer of 2012 and covered the entire United States and Canada and much of Europe, Mellencamp opened each concert with a showing of a Kurt Markus documentary about the making of "No Better Than This" called "It's About You" before hitting the stage to play three different sets: a stripped-down acoustic set with his band, a solo acoustic set, and a fully electrified rock set. "It'll be like Alan Freed, like the old Moondog shows", Mellencamp told Billboard magazine prior to the tour: Mellencamp played for over two hours and included 24 songs in his setlist on the tour. He brought the "No Better Than This" tour to Europe in the summer of 2011, opening in Copenhagen on June 24. One reviewer called the opening gig of the European leg of the tour "maybe the best rock-performance ever in Denmark." The "No Better Than This" Tour returned to the U.S. for one final round of shows from October 25 to November 19, 2011. The tour finally concluded with a tour of Canada in the summer of 2012.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp took part in two Woody Guthrie tribute concerts in 2012 as part of a year-long celebration surrounding the 100-year anniversary of the folk icon's birth.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On July 8, 2014, Mellencamp released a new live album called "Performs Trouble No More Live at Town Hall" without any advance notice. The album captures his live performance at Town Hall in New York City on July 31, 2003, in which he performed every track from his 2003 "Trouble No More" covers album in addition to a rendition of "Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan and reworked versions of three of his own songs. Two songs performed at the 2003 Town Hall concert, the 1962 Skeeter Davis hit "The End of the World" and the traditional folk song "House of the Rising Sun", did not make the final track list despite the album's official press release stating that the CD and digital versions "feature the complete 15-song concert."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In October 2013, Mellencamp revealed that he was working on a new album, and he offered this update on the project to the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune": "I've had a couple rehearsals with the band, and T Bone [Burnett] and I go in the studio in January. I'm not part of the music business. I want to write my songs, do some little shows." A short time later, Mellencamp told "Rolling Stone": "I've got a notebook with 85 new songs that I've written for my next record. T Bone Burnett is going to come out to Indiana sometime in early January and we're gonna go into the studio for however long it takes to make a new album. I haven't done one in five years."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In January 2014, Mellencamp began recording the project, which would ultimately be titled "Plain Spoken" and would become his 20th album of original material and 22nd studio album overall. The album was released on September 23, 2014. Although Mellencamp said that Burnett would serve as the producer of "Plain Spoken", Burnett was only credited as the "executive producer" of the album.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Outside of the Plain Spoken Tour, Mellencamp's most noteworthy live performance in 2015 came on February 6, when he paid tribute to Bob Dylan at the annual MusiCares Person of the Year event by performing a piano-and-vocal rendition of "Highway 61 Revisited" (the piano was played by Troye Kinnett from Mellencamp's band). "USA Today" wrote: "The musical high point in a night of many highlights was probably John Mellencamp's interpretation of 'Highway 61 Revisited;' with a vocal tone and timbre that channeled Tom Waits', he made this usually scorching rocker into a blues dirge. Never has Mellencamp sounded so artful."


title: John Mellencamp

text: After a star-studded lineup paid tribute to Dylan with cover versions of some of his greatest songs, Dylan closed the evening with a 30-minute speech that included a reference to Mellencamp's 2008 song "Longest Days". Dylan said: "And like my friend John Mellencamp would singbecause John sang some truth today'one day you get sick and you don't get better.' That's from a song of his called 'Life is Short Even on Its Longest Days.' It's one of the better songs of the last few years, actually. I ain't lying." Mellencamp said Dylan's endorsement was worth more than 10 Grammys.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In December 2015, Mellencamp began recording a duets album with Carlene Carter, who was his opening act for all shows on the Plain Spoken Tour and would join Mellencamp for two songs during his set. Mellencamp and Carter's duets album, titled "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies", was released on April 28, 2017. "We wrote a couple of songs together, and she wrote some and I wrote some," Mellencamp told "USA Today" of the material on "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies". Mellencamp and Carter debuted two songs from the album, "Indigo Sunset" and "My Soul's Got Wings", during Mellencamp's concert in Tulsa on April 1, 2016 (Carter served as the opening act for the show). "Indigo Sunset" was written by both Mellencamp and Carter, while Mellencamp wrote the music to "My Soul's Got Wings", giving life to a previously unheard lyric written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. Carter was featured on only five of "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies" 13 tracks and contributed to the writing of just two songs.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp released “Easy Target”the first single from "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies" and a "reflection on the state of our country" on January 19, 2017, which was the eve of the 2017 Presidential Inauguration.


title: John Mellencamp

text: When debuting "Easy Target" on January 19, Mellencamp delivered insights into "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies": "It's crazy the way it startedit was going to be a religious record. It started out like 'Look, lets go back and do an old country religious record. We'll try to write songs that sound like those songs, but they'll be new.' And then it just kept evolving and evolving and evolving, and the songs that she was bringing and the songs that I was bringingthey weren't so religious. I write a lot of sad songs, so it's like "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies"that's where it came from."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In addition to his work on "Sad Clowns & Hillbillies", Mellencamp wrote the title song to the 2017 American war movie "The Yellow Birds", which was released on June 15, 2018, by Saban Films.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On February 1, 2018, Netflix began streaming a concert that took place on October 25, 2016, at the Chicago Theatre as part of Mellencamp's Plain Spoken Tour. The 80-minute film is more of a documentary than a true concert film, as Mellencamp narrates the entire presentation with stories about his childhood, his early days in music, his relationship with his family, the music business and many more topics.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp released a compilation album of cover songs titled "Other People's Stuff" on December 7, 2018. He began a 39-date theater tour in February 2019, dubbed "The John Mellencamp Show", that concluded April 30, 2019, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In two separate 2018 television interviews, Mellencamp teased a musical he is working on based on his 1982 No. 1 hit "Jack & Diane". On June 12, 2019, Republic Records, Federal Films and Universal Music Theatricals announced that the musical is officially in development. Mellencamp (music/lyrics) will team with Naomi Wallace (book) to form the creative team behind the still-untitled musical, with Kathleen Marshall, winner of three Tonys out of nine nominations, signed on to direct and choreograph. Mellencamp confirmed in 2021 that it will be a jukebox musical titled "Small Town" and the story will involve two kids named Jack and Diane. Mellencamp said that he wrote no new material for the project. "I told them, I have 600 songs published. Surely you can find 12-to-15 songs that will work."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp told iHeart Radio in January 2022 that "Small Town" was scheduled debut in Louisville in September 2022, but that didn't happen. The future of the musical is unknown at this time.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On February 27, 2020, Mellencamp's official social media accounts confirmed that he was currently recording an album at his Belmont Mall recording studio. In a September 2020 interview, Mellencamp guitarist Andy York said that 10 songs have already been recorded and mixed for the album, but a planned final session in April 2020 to complete the project was scuttled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Mellencamp wrote at least 15 songs. The album was scheduled for release in 2020, but the pandemic pushed its release time frame back indefinitely.


title: John Mellencamp

text: "I'm halfway done with the [new] record then the virus hit and I haven't been in the studio since the virus started," Mellencamp told Spin magazine in a feature that was published on Thanksgiving Day 2020. "I had planned to have the record out now but I haven't finished. I have 17 more songs to record. I've recorded 10 and I have 17 more to do and I'll pick 10 of the 27 songs".


title: John Mellencamp

text: In an extensive update on his website, Mellencamp said one of the songs he wrote record is called "I Always Lie to Strangers", and he shared a one-minute snippet of it on February 3, 2021. He also revealed that the album had the working title of "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack". He resumed recording on the project in March 2021, with plans to cut at least some of the 17 songs he wrote while in quarantine in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: John Mellencamp

text: In May 2021, Mellencamp revealed that he recently finished the album and that Bruce Springsteen would make a guest appearance on the project. "Bruce is singing on the new record and is playing guitar," Mellencamp said. Springsteen himself provided additional details on his collaboration with Mellencamp on his Sirius XM radio station on June 10, 2021, saying: "I worked on three songs on John’s album and I spent some time in Indiana with him. I love John a lot. He's a great songwriter and I have become very close [with him] and had a lot of fun with him. I sang a little bit on his record."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp released a CD and documentary of his 2000 Good Samaritan Tour, which consisted of free lunchtime concerts in city parks, on August 27, 2021. The documentary is narrated by Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey, who is an avowed Mellencamp fan.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On September 29, 2021, Mellencamp released the audio and music video for "Wasted Days", a duet with Springsteen, as the lead single from "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack". Written and produced solely by Mellencamp, "Wasted Days" is a song about aging and making the most of the time one has left. The album’s second single, "Chasing Rainbows", was released on December 10, 2021. "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack" was released on January 21, 2022.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp stated in 2021 that he had booked 80 shows for 2022, but the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic ultimately caused him to cancel his 2022 Strictly a One-Eyed Jack tour and push it until 2023. “I’m gonna err on the side of caution,” Mellencamp told Billboard Magazine. “I do not want some guy walking up to me going, ‘Hey John, I saw you in Detroit’ or something, ‘it was a great show except my wife got COVID and died.’ Just the thought of hearing that…The business side of my career is like, ‘This many people will see it! You can make this much money!’ Blah, blah, blah. But once this latest round of COVID hit I said, ‘Guys, what’s the difference — this year, next year? There’s no difference.’ So next year, hopefully, we’ll be on top of (the pandemic) and it’ll feel alright to go out.”


title: John Mellencamp

text: “I’m already writing songs for another record, so that’s how far ahead I am,” Mellencamp said. “I’m talking to you about a record ("Strictly a One-Eyed Jack") that’s been done for about a year and a half, so I’m already on to my new songs — not as a job, just as they come. I can tell you there’s a couple good songs already that I thought, ‘Wow, did I write that fuckin’ song?!’ So that’s encouraging.”


title: John Mellencamp

text: Some of the songs that may be on Mellencamp's next album are leftovers from "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack". “The album is really about one guy, just one guy’s voice speaking about his life,” Mellencamp explains, speaking of "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack". “When I put it together it felt like John Huston sent me all these songs. And I wrote quite a few songs for this record, and some of the songs didn’t have his voice, didn’t have the feeling that this record has. So they were eliminated, and it didn’t take me long to make that decision. I’d walk in and the guys in the band would look at me and go, ‘Not the same guy talking,’ so we’d just move on to another song. But some of those songs we didn’t record were pretty good, too.”


title: John Mellencamp

text: In the summer of 2022, Mellencamp confirmed through his social media channels that he is, indeed, working on the follow-up to "Strictly a One-Eyed Jack". On August 24, 2022, he shared the lyrics to a brand new song called “The Eyes of Portland” – a diatribe against homelessness that will be on the new record.


title: John Mellencamp

text: During a performance in his hometown of Seymour, Indiana on September 17, 2022 to benefit the Southern Indiana Center for the Arts, Mellencamp revealed the title of the new record to be "Orpheus Descending". "The name of the new record is "Orpheus Descending,"" Mellencamp said to the audience. "Do you guys know who Orpheus was? He was a Greek god that came down, and he was the best singer, the best songwriter, and men wanted to be like him and girls wanted to be with him. What happened was the girl he fell in love with got sent to Haiti, he went down and met with the devil and bad things happened...You can read about Orpheus in Greek mythology."


title: John Mellencamp

text: "Orpheus Descending" will be released in February 2023. Mellencamp will launch a 76-date tour in 2023 called "Live and in Person" that will begin February 5 in Bloomington, Indiana and end on June 24 in South Bend, Indiana. The tour will mark the return of violinist Lisa Germano to Mellencamp's band. Germano played with Mellencamp from 1985-1993 before leaving in 1994 to pursue a solo career.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp co-wrote several of his best-known songs with his childhood friend George Green who, like Mellencamp, was born and raised in Seymour, Indiana. Green contributed lyrics to numerous Mellencamp radio hits and classic album tracks, including "Human Wheels", "Minutes to Memories", "Hurts So Good", "Crumblin' Down", "Rain on the Scarecrow", "Your Life is Now", and "Key West Intermezzo", in addition to songs recorded by Barbra Streisand, Hall & Oates, Jude Cole, Ricky Skaggs, Sue Medley, The Oak Ridge Boys, Percy Sledge, and Carla Olson.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp and Green's final collaboration was "Yours Forever", a song that was included on the soundtrack to the 2000 movie, "The Perfect Storm". Mellencamp and Green had a falling out in the early 2000s, and Green ultimately moved from Bloomington, Indiana to Taos, New Mexico in 2001. "Like when you're married, when you're friends with somebody for a long time, the more things build up the more things can go wrong," Mellencamp said in the liner notes to his 2010 box set, "On the Rural Route 7609". "There were personal problems, cross-pollinated with professional issues. George has written some great lyrics and we've written some great songs together, but I just couldn't do it any more."


title: John Mellencamp

text: On August 28, 2011, Green died in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the age of 59 after losing a battle with a rapid-forming small cell lung cancer. "I've known George since we were in the same Sunday school class. We had a lot of fun together when we were kids. Later on, we wrote some really good songs together," Mellencamp told the "Bloomington Herald Times" shortly after Green's death. "George was a dreamer, and I was sorry to hear of his passing."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's musical style has been described as rock, heartland rock, roots rock, and folk rock. AllMusic describes Mellencamp's sound as a "heartland blend of Stonesy hard rock and folk."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Country music star Keith Urban has consistently cited Mellencamp's influence on his music. It originated when Mellencamp's Lonesome Jubilee tour went to Australia in 1988 - Urban was in attendance at one of the concerts and described the experience as an "epiphany."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Urban told the "Vancouver Sun" in 2016: "For me, "The Lonesome Jubilee" was the defining record and tour. I've since gotten to know John a little bit and it was one of the greatest opportunities I've ever had to meet a hero and tell him about a concert you went to when you were a nobody and how much of an effect that concert had on me... I was hit by lightning by that concert. I said to John, 'I didn't walk away thinking: I want to do that. I walked away feeling: I get it — just put all the things you love into what you do.' It was singularly the most important concert I've ever been to in my life because it showed me the way.”


title: John Mellencamp

text: Urban has covered numerous Mellencamp songs in his concerts over the years, including "Hurts So Good", "Jack and Diane", "Authority Song", and "Rumble Seat". In 2015, Urban and Mellencamp performed "Pink Houses" together twice during nationally televised events. Urban's 2015 hit single "" further illustrated Mellencamp's influence on his music.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp has won one Grammy Award (Best Male Rock Performer for "Hurts So Good" in 1983) and been nominated for 12 others. He has also been bestowed with the Nordoff-Robbins Silver Clef Special Music Industry Humanitarian Award (1991), the Billboard Century Award (2001), the Woody Guthrie Award (2003), and the ASCAP Foundation Champion Award (2007). On October 6, 2008, Mellencamp won the prestigious Classic Songwriter Award at the 2008 Q Awards in London, England. Mellencamp was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 14, 2018. On August 30, 2018, Mellencamp was bestowed with the Woody Guthrie Prize in Tulsa, Oklahoma.


title: John Mellencamp

text: On September 9, 2010, Mellencamp received the Americana Lifetime Achievement Award in Nashville. On July 30, 2012, in San Jose, CA, Mellencamp was honored with the John Steinbeck Award, given to those individuals who exemplify the spirit of "Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of the common man."


title: John Mellencamp

text: On April 27, 2016, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) presented Mellencamp with its prestigious Founders Award at the 33rd annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards in Los Angeles. The ASCAP Founders Award goes to pioneering ASCAP songwriters who have made exceptional contributions to music by inspiring and influencing their fellow music creators. "For the last four decades, John Mellencamp has captured the American experience in his songs", said ASCAP President Paul Williams. "His infectious melodies and compassionate lyrics, wrapped in workingman's rock, crystallize life's joys and struggles and illuminate the human condition. A national treasure, he's also one of the truly great music creators that can make us care, move, clap and sing along."


title: John Mellencamp

text: In June 2019, WhyHunger bestowed Mellencamp with the ASCAP Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award, which shines a spotlight on artists who have proven their commitment to striving for social justice and creating real change in combating hunger worldwide.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2008. The induction ceremony took place in New York City on March 10, 2008, and he was inducted by his good friend Billy Joel, who asked Mellencamp to induct him into the Rock Hall back in 1999 (he had to opt out because of another commitment, so Ray Charles inducted Joel). During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:


title: John Mellencamp

text: Noted art writer Hilarie M. Sheets, a contributing editor to "ARTnews" who writes regularly for "The New York Times", called Mellencamp "a natural storyteller" in a 2012 essay she wrote about his artwork. Known over the course of his successful four-decade music career for his acutely observed songs about the American landscape and its cast of characters, Mellencamp has been equally productive as a painter mining similar terrain. Mellencamp's interest in painting began in early life but was superseded in the 1980s by his skyrocketing musical career. Throughout his life, however, Mellencamp has continued to seriously explore painting.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's late mother, Marilyn, loved to paint landscapes and flowers, and her son fell in love with both art and music at an early age. "I started messing around with oil paints when I was about ten but, you know, without instruction," he remembers.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp came to New York in the mid-1970s with the intention of studying painting if his music career aspirations didn't pan out. In 1988, he joined the Art Students League and had his first formal training with portrait painter David Leffel, who taught him the technique of painting dark to light in the manner of Rembrandt and other old masters. His discovery of early 20th-century modernists including Chaim Soutine, Walt Kuhn, and particularly the German Expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann pointed the way toward a visceral, pared-down approach to portraiture. He later studied with Jan Royce from the "Herron School of Art and Design" in Indianapolis.


title: John Mellencamp

text: His portraiture evolved to a personal style that some critics describe as similar to the dark and shadowy paintings of the German Expressionists. They involve expressiveness by means of exaggeration and distortion of line and color, in favor of a simplified style intended to carry an emotional impact. According to Mellencamp, "German painting remains the basic foundation for what I do same as folk music is the foundation of my songs. Discovering Beckmann to me was like discovering Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan."


title: John Mellencamp

text: Mellencamp's paintings from the 1990s—of family and friends and many of himself—show lone figures isolated frontally against simple, shadowy backgrounds. They stare at the viewer or off into space with eyes both tough and vulnerable, projecting intensity akin to Beckmann's self-portraits with his sad, glowering eyes.


title: John Mellencamp

text: Art writer Doug McClemont, in a review for "Art Space", stated: "Mellencamp paints handsomely grotesque portraits in oil that are as solemn and stirring as his hit songs are catchy and inspirational. They depict existential scenes and human beings ridden with the angst of the everyday. There are no smiles on the faces of Mellencamp's painted figures. His sad clowns, ex-girlfriends, creative heroes, imagined outliers, and hillbilly singers are often endowed with oversize hands and facial features and always with deadpan, proud stares."