“Lonely Ol' Night” by John Mellencamp

John Mellencamp wrote "Lonely Ol' Night" and sent it out as the lead single from Scarecrow in 1985, and it reached number 6 on the Hot 100 and spent five weeks atop the Top Rock Tracks chart. The title came from the movies: as a young man he watched Hud, the 1963 Paul Newman film drawn from Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By, again and again, and its bruising father-and-son standoff between Hud and Homer Bannon, played by Melvyn Douglas, fed a lot of his songwriting.

It was cut on April 9, 1985 at Belmont Mall in Belmont, Indiana, with Kenny Aronoff on drums, Toby Myers on bass, and Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic on guitars, Wanchic also singing backup. Mellencamp, billing himself as Little Bastard, produced with Don Gehman, and Gehman and Greg Edward engineered.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.