John Mellencamp thinks cigarettes made him sound like Louis Armstrong

It turns out heartland rocker John Mellencamp has a not-so-secret trick to making his voice sound good: smoking cigarettes.

In an interview with Forbes, Mellencamp hailed the effect smoking has had on his vocals, choosing the song ‘Gone So Soon’ from his forthcoming album Strictly a One-Eyed Jack as an example.

“We were laughing. When we were making this record, it was like, ‘John, your voice has changed so much since you started,'” he explained. “And I said, ‘Well, the cigarettes are starting to pay off.’ And I was happy when I heard me sing ‘Gone So Soon’, that I sounded like Louis Armstrong.”

It wasn’t an intentional act by the singer though. “It wasn’t anything I tried to do,” Mellencamp insisted. “It’s just that cigarettes take their fucking toll on your vocal cords… You can tell by just talking to me that my voice is raspy, and that’s all from smoking. Nothing that I wanted to do. It never dawned on me that it would happen, but I’m happy that I sound that way.”

Mellencamp also reflected on his career as a whole during the interview. “How do you get good at something? You just keep doing it,” he considered. “And most people quit too early, that’s what I’ve found… Courage is knowing you’re beat before you even start, but you start anyway, and you see it to the end, no matter what the result.

And that’s what we did on this record. That’s just the way it worked out. I learned 10, 15 years ago, you can’t control art. True art is when you let the art go where it wants to go.”

Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, Mellencamp’s 25th studio album, is scheduled for release on Friday, January 21st. It can be pre-ordered here.