"I just heard them walk in," Mellencamp, who also has three other children from previous relationships, said during the interview. Truth is, that's pretty much how it happened for Mellencamp and his wife, fashion model Elaine Irwin.Ī small-town Pennsylvania girl (before pursing her modeling career in New York), Irwin brings the couple's young sons, Speck and Hud, to the recording studio most nights to eat dinner with their daddy. doll and brought her to this small town/Now she's small town just like me. "You could carpet the whole town," the rocker reported in a phone interview from his Belmont Mall studios, where he was at work on his forthcoming CD "Cuttin Heads."įitting that Seymour, Ind., native Mellencamp, who performs Saturday at "Tiger Jam IV" at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, set up shop in Belmont, seeing as how he sung the praises of such a life in the song "Small Town." Thats the turn-of-the-century home and studio of, as the sign out front reads, a "native Hoosier artist" who created impressionist works.īelmont also houses the factory where John Mellencamp likely the area's most notable business owner churns out his records. There's no post office in Belmont but there is a small motel, a country-and-western store and the T.C. In fact, it doesn't even have an official population figure. The hamlet in the southern half of the state is technically not a city, according to the convention and visitors bureau of Brown County (in which Belmont sits). It doesnt get much smaller than Belmont, Ind. "Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town/And people let me be just what I want to be.