Concert Reviews
“I’m hard to get along with, and I’m not for everybody, but I’m for you,” Mellencamp told the crowd there for his self-proclaimed greatest hits tour.
John Mellencamp performs during the IHeartRadio Music Awards in Los Angeles this past March. He brought his current tour to Xfinity Center Friday night. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
John Mellencamp at Xfinity Center, Mansfield, July 24, 2026.
John Mellencamp has explicitly billed his current “Dancing Words” tour as a greatest-hits set, to which a natural response would be: Aren’t all the old classic rockers, as an unspoken rule, doing greatest-hits sets? It’s true, Mellencamp could have stopped making records after the ’80s and still had a lucrative career trotting out his biggest heartland rock singles on the county fair circuit, and it’s also true that he never exactly stopped playing “Jack & Diane” or “Pink Houses.”
Give a close listen to Mellencamp’s albums, though, and a more complicated artist emerges. Beneath the Midwest-everyman image is a deep bitterness at life’s hardships and injustices which can manifest as resigned sorrow, antisocial belligerence, or the sort of creative restlessness that leads one to drop old fan favorites from the setlist to make room for new material. For Mellencamp, giving the people what they want doesn’t come naturally.
Or, as Mellencamp himself put it to the Mansfield crowd Friday night, “I’m hard to get along with, and I’m not for everybody, but I’m for you.” This characteristically frank introduction followed the opening number “Lawless Times,” a 2014 album cut which was the newest song of the evening but sounded the oldest, serving as an effective representative of the gravel-voiced American roots music which has been Mellencamp’s bread and butter for the last 20 years. With the very next song, “Small Town,” the hit parade started in earnest.
Mellencamp has always filled his band with excellent musicians, and the eight-piece ensemble currently backing him is no exception. Many of these folks are Mellencamp veterans (guitarist Mike Wanchic has stuck with him for an incredible 50 years), and they’ve figured out exactly how these songs should sound live: crisp and punchy, with plenty of harmonies to give the choruses that extra anthemic juice. Violinist Lisa Germano quickly asserted herself as the not-so-secret weapon, her piercingly melodic leads versatile enough to drive the pulse-quickening momentum of “Paper in Fire” or accentuate the wistful beauty of “Check It Out.”
As for Mellencamp, he more than held his own. The hoarseness in his vocal chords made lyrics he wrote as a prematurely world-weary young man feel a little extra substantial, and while he can still hit most of the notes, he’s canny about delegating the ones he can’t to the audience or bandmates. Performance-wise, he paces, shouts, and gesticulates enough to remain a compelling stage presence, even if his few attempts at dancing could charitably be described as “age-appropriate.”
For all his not-for-everybody bluster, Mellencamp seemed to be in genuinely good spirits for most of the night, no doubt thanks to the enthusiastic devotion of his fans. He repeatedly marveled at how well everyone was getting along, wondering aloud at one point, “Why the [expletive] can’t the world be more like the audience?” Closing the first set with a solo acoustic version of “Jack and Diane,” Mellencamp did interrupt the lovefest to scold the loudly singing along crowd for skipping the second verse. To be fair, this is not the first audience to make this exact mistake on this tour (it also happened the last time he was in Boston). How could so many people be forgetting the immortal line, “Suckin’ on a chili dog/Outside the Tastee Freeze”?
Following a brief intermission (during which Mellencamp snuck in some of his newer songs via music videos on the big screen), the second set somehow managed to be even more hit-packed than the first. Backing vocalist and saxophonist Crystal Taliefero made the most of her star turn as Mellencamp’s duet partner on “Wild Night,” bringing out his playful side as the two danced to the rhythm section’s infectious groove. On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, the seething anger with which the band attacked “Rain on the Scarecrow” made the economic crisis which inspired Mellencamp to co-found Farm Aid four decades ago feel harrowingly contemporary.
It’s hard to transition from a song that intense back into good-time rock ‘n’ roll, but the one-two punch of “Authority Song” and “Crumblin’ Down” did the job nicely. Next came “Pink Houses,” whose triumphant-sounding chorus has always been at odds with the more conflicted view of American life presented in the verses. A brilliant violin solo from Germano brought some of the song’s underlying melancholy to the surface, while after the lyric about folks who “go to work in some high rise/and vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico,” Mellencamp made a point of saying, “it is called the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America.”
That was about as political as Mellencamp got all night. After all, this is a greatest hits tour; the whole point is to let people find solace in the past before returning, spiritually rejuvenated, to the present. Not that it’s ever that easy for people like Mellencamp. In this context, the exuberant nostalgia of “Cherry Bomb” hit particularly hard, especially the part where the narrator can’t help but mock himself for being so sentimental.
For the last song, “Hurts So Good,” Mellencamp brought a young fan onstage to sing. He seemed thrilled to be there and really hammed it up, but it honestly felt a little weird to end the night by hearing a kid sing, “Lord knows the things we could do, baby, just me and you.” I suppose it was just one more way for Mellencamp to show his gratitude to the fans. After all this, he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants on the next tour — well, just as long as he still plays “Jack and Diane.”
Setlist for John Mellencamp at Xfinity Center, Mansfield, Friday, July 24, 2026:
Set 1:
- Lawless Times
- Small Town
- Lonely Ol’ Night
- Paper in Fire
- Human Wheels (Intro only)
- Walk Tall
- R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to ’60s Rock)
- Love and Happiness
- Our Country
- Check It Out
- Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)
- Jack & Diane (Solo)
Set 2:
- I Need a Lover
- Minutes to Memories
- Your Life Is Now
- Wild Night (Van Morrison cover)
- Ain’t Even Done with the Night
- Pop Singer
- Rain on the Scarecrow
- Authority Song
- Crumblin’ Down
- Pink Houses
- Cherry Bomb
- Hurts So Good
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