Songfacts®:

• Eight years before Quentin Tarantino released the movie Jackie Brown, John Mellencamp used the title for a song that tells a very different story. Mellencamp's Jackie Brown is a destitute man who will never escape poverty.
  
  The song is not so much a social commentary as a reflection of how Mellencamp was feeling at the time. His finances and career were on the upswing, but he was devastated by the recent divorce from his second wife, Victoria Granucci, who took their two young daughters with her when she left their home in Indiana. Mellencamp explained to Rolling Stone: "I wrote 'Jackie Brown' about myself in a different scenario: me disguised as a poor guy - not as a guy that had been successful and pretty much lost everything, which in my mind I had, because I'd lost my daughters. The song is about how you have to go outside to use the bathroom because you've sunk so low."
• The big hit from Mellencamp's album Big Daddy was "Pop Singer," the first single. "Jackie Brown" was the second single, and although it didn't do well on the charts, it became a fan favorite and one Mellencamp speaks highly of.
  
  "Jackie Brown might be one of the best songs I ever wrote," he said. "It's very honest. That song's been written before, but I think I wrote it as good as anybody could write it."