Mellencamp wrote over 30 songs for potential inclusion on the album but only 13 made the final cut. He debuted the first of those, "Save Some Time to Dream", on May 17, 2009, at a political fundraiser for President
Barack Obama at the Westin Hotel in downtown
Indianapolis. "It's about individual freedom and thought—and controlling our own lives", Mellencamp said of "Save Some Time to Dream", which he performed solo on acoustic guitar throughout much of his 2009 summer tour with
Bob Dylan and
Willie Nelson. During breaks on the Nelson/Dylan tour, Mellencamp recorded
No Better Than This at historic locations, such as the
First African Baptist Church in
Savannah, Georgia, as well as at the historic
Sun Studios in
Memphis and the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in
San Antonio, where blues pioneer
Robert Johnson recorded blues staples such as "
Sweet Home Chicago" and "
Cross Road Blues". Mellencamp recorded the album using a 1955
Ampex portable recording machine and only one microphone, requiring all the musicians to gather together around the mic. The album was recorded in mono, the same manner as the classic folk and blues recordings of the 1930s and 1940s. Mellencamp wrote one song specifically for Room 414 at the
Gunter Hotel, which is the exact room where Johnson recorded in November 1936. He told the San Antonio Express-News, "It's called 'Right Behind Me' or 'Right Behind Us,' I haven't decided yet. I wrote it just for this room. I could have done this in my studio. But I want to do it this way, and if I can't do what I want at this point, I'm not going to do it. If it's not fun, I'm not going to do it. I'm through digging a ditch". "John is a really great singer and I'm always happy working with him in any environment",
T Bone Burnett told the
Express-News. "The fact he chose these historic locations is a big plus. The stories that have come out of the sessions are extraordinary. The
First African Baptist Church was started in 1775. It was an important stop on the
Underground Railroad and central to the
civil rights movement.
Sun Studio, from a completely different angle, was also important to the civil rights movement and, from another angle, so were
Robert Johnson's recordings at the Gunter." During Mellencamp's session at
Sun Studios in late July 2009, he recorded several songs including "Each Day of Sorrow", "No One Cares About Me", "The West End", and "Easter Eve", which
Rolling Stone magazine's
David Fricke compared to "one of
Bob Dylan's
talking blues". Regarding this session, Mellencamp told the magazine, "[T Bone] and I were laughing. We got five songs here last night. We asked ourselves, 'What the fuck were we doing in the 70s and 80s, spending days and days on a drum sound, when it was all right here the whole time?'" "Everything was set up exactly as
Johnny Cash and
Elvis Presley recorded. They had 'X' marks made with electrical tape on the floor where Elvis and his musicians stood and where the instruments were placed, because
Sam Philips walked around the room and decided where everything sounded best". Mellencamp wanted to record at the now-derelict
Brunswick Records Building in Dallas, where
Robert Johnson cut his final sessions in 1937, but the current owner of the building denied him permission to record there. As for the organic recording process of the album, Mellencamp says it's unique for this day and age. "The same mic I was singing into is the same mic that recorded the drums at the same time," Mellencamp said on his website. "And everything was cut live with no overdubs or studio nothing! These are real songs being performed by real musicians—an unheard-of process in today's world. Real music, for real people!" Mellencamp has said in interviews to promote the album that the song "The West End" is not about a certain part of town but rather about America, which is the west end of the world. ==Promotion and release==