John Fogerty—Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years (John's Version)

Taking inspiration from Taylor Swift, John Fogerty re-records his CCR classics, diminishing the contributions of his old bandmates in the process.

John Fogerty—Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years (John’s Version) [2025]

★★

You’d be forgiven if Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years (John’s Version), John Fogerty’s latest collection of re-recordings of his classic CCR songs, sparks a sense of déjà vu all over again. The last four decades have seen Fogerty continually reclaiming his stake in the CCR songbook he abandoned in protest after the band’s acrimonious split in 1972. He spent the first 15 years of his solo career avoiding the tunes that built his reputation, finally acquiescing to demand in the late 1980s after Bob Dylan told him if he didn’t sing “Proud Mary,” everybody would think the song belonged to Tina Turner.

Two years ago, Fogerty acquired the majority interest in CCR’s publishing, a victory he celebrates with Legacy, an album designed to replicate—and perhaps even replace—the original Creedence records. It’s a project proposed by Fogerty’s wife Julie and, as its subtitle suggests, inspired by Taylor Swift’s re-recordings of her Big Machine catalog. Swift’s “Taylor’s Versions” were made with the intent of supplanting the original recordings, especially in terms of syncs and licensing; they were close enough to the hit versions to fool anybody that wasn’t playing close attention. That’s the motivation behind Legacy, too. Fogerty told Billboard, “Our goal is to have them play the new versions,” softening this statement by explaining that Julie “had a vision that was full of joy, and part of that vision was re-recording my songs.”

This framing implies Legacy is the final act of reclamation; these songs don’t belong to the band, they belong to John. Fogerty continued down this road in a conversation with Rolling Stone, where he claimed that he’s not quite a “household name” because “I named myself Creedence Clearwater Revival.” Elsewhere in that interview, Fogerty claimed that recording Legacy led him to develop “ a much deeper respect and awareness for what had gone on in 1968 or ‘69—in a sense, I did what the Beatles did, but I did it all by myself. I didn’t have two other guys to write songs with me.”

Fogerty did, of course, have three other guys with him—he just didn’t allow them to do much. He controlled every aspect of Creedence, writing and singing their songs, dictating their aesthetic, signing them to onerous contracts that would plague him for most of his life. When the rest of CCR wanted creative input, Fogerty stonewalled, driving his guitarist brother Tom away from the group. Whittled to a trio, John suddenly pushed Stu Cook and Doug Clifford—the rhythm section who underpinned the band for years, long before they were known as the Golliwogs—to contribute original tunes to Mardi Gras, a dictate that accelerated the band’s dissolution. Mardi Gras had one hit: “Sweet Hitch Hiker,” a likeable rocker that felt like a footnote to the band’s legacy and is nowhere to be found on Legacy.

The sudden collapse of CCR’s good fortune seems to underscore the notion that John Fogerty alone propelled Creedence Clearwater Revival. There is some logic to this argument. Like Robbie Robertson in the Band, he was an ambitious auteur whose destiny was intertwined with a bunch of guys who didn’t like to work too hard. Once CCR’s version of Dale Hawkins’s “Suzie Q” brought them within spitting distance of the Billboard Top Ten, Fogerty consigned himself to his spartan apartment, staring at a blank wall until his mind wandered into a mythic Americana conjured through his dream memories of dime store novels, backwoods blues, TV westerns, and Sun Records. His commitment to the sensibility of early rock’n’roll meant that CCR’s songs didn’t seem written, they felt excavated; they were eternal truths that were accidentally unearthed. Fogerty’s allergy to hippie excess meant Creedence avoided the rock cliches of the late 1960s. Their singles were crisp and clean, yet CCR also took advantage of the album format, occasionally jamming long enough to take up almost an entire side of an LP. When they stretched out, they did not indulge in solos; they locked into a thick, murky groove they called “choogling.”

Fogerty sings about “choogling” down to New Orleans on “Born on the Bayou,” the song that unlocks the problem with this whole Legacy enterprise. The new version of “Born on the Bayou” follows the straight and narrow, a tight and bright rendition that removes the song from the swamp. In comparison, the original Creedence version always seems on the verge of sinking into the sludge. The choogle comes from the friction between the rhythm section and Fogerty; he sounds as if he’s battling through mud.

The shagginess of choogling mirrored the odd internal dynamic fueling Creedence. Fogerty pushed the band as hard as he pushed himself, eventually growing resentful that the other three did not share his monomanical work ethic. All those perceived slights still seemed fresh as recently as 2015, when he published Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music, a memoir percolating with old grievances. Within its pages, he claims Stu Cook pushed Saul Zanetz to have Fantasy sue Fogerty. He also has it in for Clifford: at one point, he gleefully recounts how he painstakingly shaved seconds off one of the drummer’s recorded performances, dumping the remnants at his bandmate’s doorstep while cackling, “Here’s your drum track!”

The decades have softened and sweetened Fogerty. His current live shows are unabashedly and enthusiastically nostalgic—the performance I witnessed at SXSW earlier this year was a bunch of fun—and in his Rolling Stone interview, he did manage to tip his hat to his old bandmates, albeit in a grudging fashion: “Even though Tom was limited as a guitar player—he wasn’t full of technique and years of lessons and all that—he certainly had great rhythm and could play great rhythm parts. And the same with Doug and Stu eventually.” His perfectionistic tendencies haven’t abated. He recounted to Billboard the process of re-recording “Up Around the Bend,” a song where he wanted his son Shane to play its signature piercing lick: “When we listened back [to the recording] even though he had my Acme guitar, it didn’t sound the same. He’s a great guitar player, and I didn’t want him to get offended. It was a Friday. I could sense what was wrong. I said, ‘Shane, I want you to take the guitar home and practice this over the weekend. Listen to the record and get yourself to where you’re wiggling on that top string.’ He comes back on Monday. I know he worked on it a lot, and he goes in and nails it.”

Naturally, his sons are deferential to Fogerty’s vision in a way that schoolmates and a brother never would be, a dynamic that does give Legacy a cheerful patina. That’s the purpose of the whole project: it’s supposed to offer the pleasures of Creedence Clearwater Revival without any of the messiness of Creedence Clearwater Revival. These versions sound their best heard in the background, when the melody and energy supersede groove and feel. Those are the intangible qualities that Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and Stu Cook brought to CCR, adding depth and dimension to Fogerty’s songs. Their absence is keenly felt on Legacy, providing a refutation of the album’s central thesis that John Fogerty alone was the reason for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s success.

Buckingham Nicks—Buckingham Nicks

Out of print for years, the first album from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks gets a long overdue reissue.

Buckingham Nicks—Buckingham Nicks [1973; 2025]

★★★★

The legend of Buckingham Nicks, the lone record released by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before joining Fleetwood Mac, looms so large it can overshadow the album itself. Long out of print—it never made it back to market during the heyday of CDs, a wrong that's finally rectified with this week's Rhino reissue (it's unadorned with bonus tracks and it sounds much cleaner and better than the needle drop bootleg I've had for years)—Buckingham Nicks is often positioned as a prologue to the real Fleetwood Mac story. Its scarcity suggested that it could easily be skipped; if it could stand on its own merits, it'd find its way back into circulation.

Nothing with Fleetwood Mac is ever that simple, of course. Buckingham Nicks remained in the vaults due to a combination of backstage drama and "inertia," as Lindsey Buckingham characterized it to Uncut way back in 2011. The album's fate became an afterthought amid the turmoil surrounding Buckingham's dismissal from Fleetwood Mac in 2018 yet, for whatever reason, tensions have thawed enough to allow for Buckingham Nicks to receive a reissue just in time for its 52nd birthday.

Very few people heard Buckingham Nicks upon its original release in the fall of 1973. Polydor, the duo's label, didn't invest in the way of promotion and without that support, there was no way for this deliberately commercial music to find an audience. It did make its way to one crucial listener. Keith Olsen, the producer of Buckingham Nicks and the duo's biggest booster within the music industry, played the album for Mick Fleetwood when the drummer was auditioning recording studios. He immediately fell for the blend of burnished folk-rock and sunkissed pop, hiring the duo to fill the absence left by Bob Welch.

There are a few threads tying together Buckingham Nicks and Fleetwood Mac, the first album the band made with the duo. "Frozen Love," the epic that closes the '73 LP, hints at the roiling melodrama that surfaced on "World Turning" and would later come to fruition on "The Chain." Both records share "Crystal," a delicate tune whose minor key skirts the edges of sadness. The difference between the two versions is instructive. On Fleetwood Mac, "Crystal" is laden with texture and underpinned by the assured thump of Fleetwood. Here, Buckingham and Nicks are given full studio support yet feel as if they're singing to each other: the focus is entirely on the shared bond between the two vocalists.

That intimacy is also evident in Buckingham's instrumental support of Nicks, where he gives her keening melodies a precise, plucked backing. There's electric guitar here, notably during the extended climax of "Frozen Love," but the acoustic guitar dominates, so much so that Lindsey is given two instrumental showcases for his fingerpicking: a fleeting rendition of John Lewis's "Django," plus the still, sparkling "Stephanie." Moreover, Buckingham Nicks feels folky in the way that so many albums of the early 1970s do. It is a collection of tender, introspective moments, softly strummed and sweetly harmonized; it's music for the dawn or dusk, a soundtrack for the moment when the day starts to shed its skin.

Fittingly, there are a couple of cuts from both Buckingham and Nicks that do feel like the beginning of something new. In addition to "Frozen Love," one of a handful of co-compositions between Buckingham and Nicks, Stevie's "Crying in the Night" builds upon its insistent melody, turning into a pristine example of high-end studio craft, while "Don't Let Me Down Again" gallops forth like "Monday Morning," hinting that the frenzy Lindsey achieved in his power-pop. In these passages, it's possible to hear the birth of Fleetwood Mac, yet the album's charm lies in how it's a snapshot of a specific moment. Deep in the process of discovering their voices, Buckingham and Nicks are earnest in their emotions and attention to musical detail, crafting an album whose hazy beauty remains fetching years later.

Suede, Antidepressants

The Britpop veterans reject nostalgia on their powerful, passionate tenth album.

Suede—Antidepressants [2025]

★★★★

Brett Anderson sings of "Broken Music for Broken People" halfway through Antidepressants, a statement of purpose on a continuum with "Trash," the 1996 hit by Suede where he sighed "we're the litter on the breeze." That's where the similarities end. Like every album they've released since returning to active duty, Antidepressants purposefully avoids the gleaming glam of Coming Up, a fizzy sound that ultimately led Suede to the perfunctory professionalism of A New Morning, their fifth album and last for eleven years.

Antidepressants is the fifth album Suede have released since reuniting for Bloodsports, the 2013 comeback album that blended the gothic sweep of Dog Man Star with the gnarled guitars of Suede. After mounting their comeback, Suede dedicated themselves to the mundane business of being in a rock'n'roll band. They've spent their last twelve years regularly writing, recording, and touring, continually building upon their legacy in a way no other Britpop band can claim. There's a lot to be said for this work ethic. Each successive album deepens their catalog, revealing new dimensions of their darkly romantic rock.

The albums they've released since Bloodsports also display a keen awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. As Anderson recently told The Times, "Time away made us realise what we did well and, also, what we did badly." Fittingly, Suede isn't seeking reinvention on Antidepressants. They're in conversation with their past, discovering what elements from their youth still resonate in the present.

Sometimes that dialogue directly evokes their history. “Sweet Kid,” a song written for Anderson’s son, is built upon a ringing riff that recalls “New Generation,” an adolescent anthem written when Suede still painted with broad brush strokes. They're still capable of creating epics—"Life is Endless, Life is a Moment" closes the album at a magisterial crawl—yet they prefer to narrow their focus. Where they once luxuriated within the languid stretch of “Stay Together” and “The Asphalt World,” they now have an urgency that comes with age. Recognizing their time isn't limitless, they dispense with extraneous instrumentation, working with a deliberately muted palette, engaging their might at precisely the right moment. There's an invigorating energy to this music: Simon Gilbert's backbeat seems thunderous even when the tempo slows, making Anderson's flights of introspection feel nervy, vulnerable, and human.

Suede's precision and passion lends a sense of poetry to these songs of quiet triumphs, acceptable disappointments, and earned connections. Despite the band's manifesto, this isn't broken music: it's bruised and battered but resilient, the kind of album that provides sustenance in troubled times.

Billy Joel: And So It Goes review

An unusually forthright—and an unusually long—documentary about the success and struggles of the piano man who never wanted to be mistaken as a soft rocker.

"I know I’m perceived as a mainstay of soft rock — which to me is like soft cock. I hate that. Fifty percent of the music on my albums is hard rock. If I was a listener, and all I knew was 'Tell Her About It,' 'It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me' and 'Uptown Girl,' I wouldn’t like Billy Joel, neither. I don’t have a soft cock – I got a hard cock." — Billy Joel, Rolling Stone, 1997

Billy Joel never did himself any favors. He fought against his natural talents, resenting the soft sounds that made him a superstar, never quite accepting that his style and flash brought him an audience that stayed with him long after he abandoned pop songwriting, if not quite pop stardom.

His retreat from the spotlight was equal parts deliberate and accidental, the kind of serendipitous contradiction that is his specialty. After ranting about erections to Anthony DeCurtis, Joel admitted he had arrived at a creative stalemate: "Here I am, I'm 48—I got to write another kind of music. I just got to do something else. I don't know." When he gave that interview, he was out hawking Greatest Hits Volume III, a 1997 compilation baited by two new recordings, both covers—tacit confirmation of his waning passion.

A few years later, Joel released Fantasies & Delusions, a collection of original classical compositions. It wasn't the opening of a new chapter so much as the closing of an old one. As Billy Joel: And So It Goes, a two-part, five-hour documentary airing on HBO Max, makes plain, he harbored a lifelong dream of composing and performing classical music. There's a passagein the film where Billy distinguishes himself from Elton John by emphasizing how his fleet technique differs from his peer's R&B boogie, and another where he claims "Uptown Girl" is essentially a Mozart piece. Looming over it all is the ghost of his father Howard, a classical pianist who abandoned his family in America to move back to Europe when Billy was a child. Howard later fathered another son, Alexander, who became a conductor of renown in Germany.

When Billy Joel finally dedicated himself to classical music, he didn't perform his compositions himself. He asked Richard Joo aboard to perform and record the pieces comprising Fantasies & Delusions, a decision that reflected his longstanding belief that he simply couldn't cut it as a classical pianist. He told Alec Baldwin in 2012, "I realized early on, I'm not going to be a concert pianist. I don't have the Rachmaninoff hands, the Horowitz hands. I have strong hands but short fingers."

Strong hands suited rock'n'roll, though. Ballads brought Billy Joel fame but rock'n'roll brought him to the stage in the first place. He never lost his inclination for the big beat, either. In the twilight of the 1960s, when the zeitgeist was shifting toward singer/songwriters, he chose to make a racket with Atilla, a Led Zeppelin-inspired drum-and-organ combo he formed with Jon Small after they left the Hassles—a spirited outfit in the vein of the Rascals—in their rearview mirror.

Attila collapsed after Joel fell in love with Small's wife Elizabeth, an affair that blossomed into a marriage and a professional partnership. Elizabeth Weber managed Joel's career through the second half of the 1970s, the period when he rose from piano bars into arenas. These are also the years when Joel wrote the lion's share of the songbook that he relies upon to this day. Weber acted as his muse and minder, yet Joel also benefitted from constant motion, picking up on musical and cultural trends that he fed back into his music.

Listening to Joel's catalog, it's striking how his albums serve as reflections of the sound of their given year. Piano Man offers a spin on the gospel-inflected Western dreams of early Elton John, 52nd Street aspires to the jazz sophistication of Steely Dan, Glass Houses picks up on what punk laid down. He didn't lack for ambition—he dabbled in art-rock, whether it was the incandescent "Prelude/Angry Young Man" or the miniature suite of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"—but he wasn't at pop's vanguard, he functioned as the barometer of the mainstream. Joel's inherent melodic gifts and innate showmanship were scuffed up by a muscular touring band then polished by Phil Ramone, the producer who gave every album from The Stranger through The Bridge a sumptuous gloss.

Joel swapped Ramone for Foreigner's Mick Jones on Storm Front, an album that Garth Brooks proclaims as "fucking moving" but feels strident and brittle compared to the rest of his catalog. Storm Front marks a breaking point in another sense. Around its release, Joel discovered his manager Frank Weber—the brother of Elizabeth who took over Billy's management once Joel divorced his wife early in the 1980s—defrauded him of millions. And So It Goes suggests this broke Joel's spirit: he made his money back, eventually, but he lost the will to write new songs.

And So It Goes paints this retreat from songwriting as a conscious decision. Billy says "I was tired of the tyranny of the rhyme," and Sting applauds his decision, claiming that Joel decided "Now it's a time to be silently stoic, and I respect that." The thing is, Joel didn't live a life of quiet seclusion. He relied on his back catalog, playing his old songs for years and years, many of them spent on the road with Elton John, who is conspicuously absent in the documentary. The pair had a falling out early in the 2010s, after John stated that Joel was an alcoholic who never took rehab seriously; shortly afterward, Joel broke from John, establishing his long-running residency at Madison Square Garden.

Joel's alcoholism hangs over And So It Goes, acknowledged but diminished; at one point, he proclaims "I've never had a DUI, so fuck you." This may be true but each of his ex-wives cites his drinking as the reason why they decided to leave. The repetition tells the story but so does their decision to all sit for new interviews: despite everything, they still like the guy.

It’s easy to see why they’re still fond of Billy. He’s candid and funny throughout And So It Goes, quick with a quip, steadying himself with a cigar whenever things threaten to veer into vulnerability. He’s also self deprecating, to the point that it seems like a fault. Dismissing his talents isn't an act, it's a habit, one that stretches back far beyond that DeCurtis interview where he equated his artistic viability with his virility. Maybe that's why Joel is so attuned to rock critics; their words echo his inner thoughts. After all, the one album he calls a success is The Nylon Curtain, a sober set where he grappled with the onset of middle age, a record whose Beatlesque aural ambitions matched his lyrical aspirations. Little wonder that when Elvis Costello sat in with Billy Joel in 2023, he duetted on "Allentown," the lead single from The Nylon Curtain; it's the kind of record aspiring rock critics love.

And So It Goes belongs to the handful of rock docs that devotes considerable time on the craft of music-making, whether it's touching upon the hours spent in the studio or untangling the meaning of certain songs. Joel never disguised his creative inspirations—he wrote "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" when he left the West Coast behind, his exuberant celebration of Christie Brinkley is called "Christie Lee"—so this doesn't provide insight so much as help shake the dust off of songs that became furniture. They can seem like sturdy relics, particularly when heard in the immaculate overblown renditions tailored for Madison Square Garden. There, his greatest hits are stripped of their original context, as they are on classic rock radio; they’re loved for their construction and craft, not their direct connection to their time.

All this is odd considering how Joel's songs provide the soundtrack for the ascendency of the Baby Boomers. And So It Goes restores cultural context to his songbook, particularly through the vintage footage that anchors both the documentary and its accompanying soundtrack (billed as two discs, it runs six and a half hours, which is roughly the combined length of all Billy's albums from Cold Spring Harbor through The Bridge). Here, the songs don't carry the weight of collective memory. They sound harder and leaner than the familiar versions, driven by a performer whose scrappy charisma complemented and battled his melodic gifts in equal measure. That unease simmered in Joel, even when the times were good. In that 1997 DeCurtis interview, he declared "I think I'm as pissed off now as I was 10 ago," an odd statement considering that a decade earlier he was riding high on the brassy The Bridge and acting as the voice of Dodger in Oliver & Company, Disney's forgotten animated Dickens adaptation.

Then again, who knows what happens behind closed doors? As Joel sang himself, "we all have a face that we hide away forever." The Joel portrayed in And So It Goes appears to have left that face stashed away and forgotten. He's living in wealth, maintaining a bond with an audience that doesn't care if he writes a new song. He's earned the respect of his peers, repaired friendships, and has the love of his family and affection of his ex-wives. Every so often, though, the mask slips, revealing a man who still can't figure out the discontent in his heart. That discomfort can't be explained by him, nor can it be conveyed to the audience, but its presence keeps his music and this movie compelling.