While watching clips on YouTube, I came across these two, back-to-back interviews of Mellencamp by Bob Costas that are thirty years old (So far, I have just watched the first one).

Mellencamp really makes some wonderful points about music and life in the first one - truly poignant observations and worth a viewing. 

On two side notes - in the first interview he expresses his 30-year view on rock musicians allowing their music for commercial purposes and is strictly against it (I have similar views and when he did it, it was a disappointment, but I grew to understand his point), but recall, he allowed this with a song of his decades later.  Two points on this - the first is when he did that he commented one reason he allowed that was because it was a way to get his music listened to by people because of the changes in music consumption.  The second point is that in line with his previous comments (about how he associated songs like The Beatles' Revolution with his experiences and how now newer listeners would associate it with commercial products) the song he allowed to be used in a Chevy commercial really does bear the same link to personal memories the same way as Revolution and Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed before they were allowed in commercials.