New York, NY (October 19, 2026)—John Mellencamp has published more than 600 songs over the years, plenty of which were Top 40 smashes, including a few that became landmarks of their time. However, going to a Mellencamp show didn’t always mean you were going to hear those hits. At times, the roots rocker has seemed almost leery of the tracks that made him a household name, whether considered lyrical snapshots like “Jack & Diane” or straight-ahead stompers like “Hurts So Good.”
That wasn’t this case this past summer, however, as Mellencamp dusted off the favorites and served them up piping hot on the appropriately named Dancing Words—The Greatest Hits tour.
Careening across the country throughout July and August, the 19-date tour played sold-out sheds, reminding concertgoers just how deep his catalog of hits goes. Out of the 23 songs on the setlist, 19 hit the Top 40, and Mellencamp hadn’t played some of them—such as “Your Life Is Now” and his well-known Van Morrison cover, “Wild Night”—in more than 20 years. To say fans went home happy is an understatement.
Helping bring those concerts to the crowds night after night was a team of audio pros determined to make 14,000-seat amphitheaters feel and sound like 1,000-seat theaters, creating an intimate soundscape that conveyed the passionate performances by Mellencamp and his eight-member backing band. Stationed behind the front-of-house desk was veteran audio engineer Brian Ruggles, backed by assistant engineer Simon Mathews. The tour carried audio production from Clair Global, with house system equipment provided by Clair and monitor gear from its subsidiary, Eighth Day Sound.
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While Ruggles is best known for mixing Billy Joel live since the early 1970s, he’s manned the house desk for Mellencamp many times over the years; for the Dancing Words jaunt, however, he was joined by other pros from Joel’s team, making it something of a class reunion.
Beyond the high-energy presence of multi-instrumentalist Crystal Taliefero on stage, other longtime Joel associates, like production manager Bobby Thrasher, lighting pros Steve Cohen and Mark Foffano, and production assistant Liz Mahon, became part of the Mellencamp camp, too. While it wasn’t necessarily a turnkey production team, the built-in familiarity of knowing how each other worked helped make for a smooth tour, Ruggles noted.
“There’s probably about 15 of us here from Billy’s team that are on this tour,” mused Ruggles. “It’s good, because we’re a really tightknit machine. We came in and we just do our thing—we do what we do.”
For Ruggles, he did what he did behind his go-to mixing console, a DiGiCo SD5. “I just like it—it’s like my baby and it has been for a long time,” he said. “I’m used to it and like the way it sounds. It works perfect for John’s show.” Having come up in the days of analog live desks, Ruggles enjoys the clarity that comes with a digital console, but prefers to remain hands-on with the SD5, mixing the show as it moves along: “I get into that ‘analog flow’ where it’s just me and my hands and the way I’m hearing it,” he said. “You have to twist it into an analog/digital thing; it’s a different animal, but it sounds great.”
Ruggles also had some of his preferred outboard gear within arm’s reach—dependable favorites like a Bricasti M7 reverb, a TC Electronic M5000 effect processor, an Eventide unit and more. “As a matter of fact, my main piece of outboard gear is a TC 1128 equalizer with a TC head [TC 6032 remote head],” he said, adding with a laugh, “It’s like my security blanket because it’s sitting on top of my outboard rack where I can grab it in a split second if I hear something that I want to pull out of the P.A. I love outboard stuff because it’s right there and you can just reach over and grab it, instead of having to go ‘button, button, button, button.’”
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The show’s mix, heard through a Cohesion P.A., was straightforward, with Ruggles making the most of the band’s Americana-flavored instrumentation. “Lisa Germano, the violinist, has a great sound,” said Ruggles, “and it can really rock, because you find its place in the mix with the other things. There’s a solo in one song where it’s guitar, electric guitar and violin—blend it together with her on top and it really cooks.”
Up on stage, monitor engineer Ed Ehrbar sent mixes through a passel of IEM systems and monitor wedges; while the entire band wore in-ear monitors, it wasn’t unusual for Mellencamp to pull them out from time to time, so the wedges were there to both provide sound in those instances and also move some air, underlining the “feel” of the band’s power onstage. Like many of the gear choices on the tour, the audio team opted for tried-and-true miking, largely sticking to standard-issue Shures and Sennheisers to get the job done.
Mellencamp and his band tore through two sets nightly with vigor and dynamics, building things up and pulling them back time and again—a good match for Ruggles’ hands-on approach to mixing. The result was a show that left the audience, band and crew all smiling at the end of the night. “I think this is a fantastic show,” said Ruggles. “I knew it would be really good, but it’s even better than I expected, and I enjoy mixing it. I walk away every night saying, ‘Wow, that was a great show!’”
