Red Colored Vinyl. HYPE-STICKER on front. Exclusive Limited Edition. Unopened/new vinyl, factory sealed, and in excellent condition. Section of shrink missing near top-right on back. (Not a cut-out.)
Sad Clowns and Hillbillies, by John Cougar Mellencamp, features significant contributions from Carlene Carter, who worked with Mellencamp on Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, his musical collaboration with Stephen King, and Ithaca, the movie he scored for Meg Ryan. Carter opened every show of Mellencamp's 2015–2016 Plain Spoken Tour. Mellencamp said Sad Clowns & Hillbillies was borne out of his collaboration with Carter on Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and Ithaca. He said through those two projects and their time on tour together that the two became "singing buddies". Mellencamp gave insight into the genesis of the project to Yahoo's Katie Couric when debuting Easy Target on January 19, 2017, saying: "It's crazy the way it started – it was going to be a religious record. It started out like 'Look, lets go back and do an old country religious record. We'll try to write songs that sound like those songs, but they'll be new.' And then it just kept evolving and evolving and evolving, and the songs that she was bringing and the songs that I was bringing – they weren't so religious. I write a lot of sad songs, so it's like Sad Clowns & Hillbillies – that's where it came from".