Every revolution needs a first shot, and the first sound on Faster Than the Speed of Night — the 1983 album that entered the UK chart at number one and relaunched Bonnie Tyler’s career — is not one of Jim Steinman’s thunderous originals. It is a cover of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, a two-and-a-half-minute swamp-rock miniature rebuilt as a widescreen piano anthem. According to Tyler, it was the very first song Steinman played for her when they met, and the first track they agreed the new album needed. The story of Have You Ever Seen the Rain? is really two stories: John Fogerty writing about a band falling apart in the sun, and, a dozen years later, a Welsh singer using the same song to announce that her own career was starting again.
Fogerty’s Song of a Band Breaking Apart
John Fogerty wrote Have You Ever Seen the Rain? for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s sixth album, Pendulum, released in December 1970, and it was issued as a single in January 1971 with Hey Tonight on the B-side. Creedence were then among the biggest bands in the world, but the song’s bright, major-key surface hides a miserable subject. “That song is really about the impending breakup of Creedence,” Fogerty told Rolling Stone in 1993. “The imagery is, you can have a bright, beautiful, sunny day, and it can be raining at the same time.”
The “rain” was internal. Fogerty’s brother Tom was on the verge of leaving the band — he quit in 1971 — and in a 2020 interview with American Songwriter Fogerty added that the famous line grew from the unease and depression the band felt at the very height of its fame. Critics have offered wider readings: AllMusic’s Mark Deming suggested the song mourns the fading idealism of the 1960s in the Nixon era, in the shadow of Altamont and Kent State. Cash Box, reviewing the single in January 1971, heard the tenderness in it, calling it “as close to a ballad as anything from CCR”. Fogerty never discouraged the broader interpretations, but the core image — a sunshower, rain falling out of a clear sky — works at every scale: success and sadness arriving in the same moment.
As a single, it was a substantial hit. It reached number one on Canada’s RPM chart in March 1971 and topped the South African chart as well, alongside number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, number three on the Cash Box chart, number three in Norway and number 36 in Britain, becoming Creedence’s eighth gold-selling single. The band split in October 1972, but the song never went away. Fogerty himself kept returning to it — a live version on his 2005 concert film The Long Road Home, and a new duet recording with Alan Jackson on his 2013 album Wrote a Song for Everyone — and for the band’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018 it received its first official video, a coming-of-age short filmed in Montana starring Jack Quaid. In March 2023 it passed one billion streams on Spotify, half a century after Fogerty wrote it in a spirit of foreboding.
The First Song on the Table
Bonnie Tyler came to the song at a personal low tide. After four albums with RCA and diminishing returns from records like Goodbye to the Island (1981), she declined the label’s offer of a new contract, signed to CBS, and — asked by A&R man Muff Winwood to scout a producer — picked out Jim Steinman, whose records with Meat Loaf she adored, as her first choice. Steinman initially said no, then relented when Tyler sent him demos of the rock material she wanted to make. Her account of their first meeting, retold in interviews, has the quality of a fable: the trail of M&Ms on the floor of Steinman’s New York apartment building leading to his door, the producer answering with his hair over his face “like Cousin Itt”, and then the two of them at the piano as he played her the songs he had in mind.
One of those songs was Have You Ever Seen the Rain?. Tyler recalled that it was the first number they settled on for the project — Steinman’s instinct being that they should build the album around dramatically reworked covers, in the manner of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with Tyler’s enormous voice as the fixed point in the middle of the storm. In the end, six of the album’s nine tracks were covers, and Have You Ever Seen the Rain? was placed first in the running order: the overture.
The covers were no filler; they were a repertory, each one chosen for what Tyler’s voice could do to it. Alongside Fogerty, she took on Bryan Adams’ Straight from the Heart — already a top-ten American hit for Adams himself that same year — Blue Öyster Cult’s Goin’ Through the Motions, and Tears, written and performed as a duet with Frankie Miller. The Miller collaboration carried a private resonance: Miller had been the first live performer the teenage Gaynor Hopkins ever saw, back in Wales. Steinman’s concept was to treat each borrowed song the way Spector treated his material — as raw ore for a production large enough to claim it outright.
Rebuilding Swamp Rock at the Power Station
The Creedence original is a marvel of economy — 2 minutes 39 seconds of organ, clipped guitar and Fogerty’s bayou drawl. Tyler’s version runs 4 minutes 8 seconds and keeps almost nothing but the melody. Recorded in New York in 1982, principally at The Power Station, the track was built by the same core band Steinman assembled for the album: Roy Bittan, on loan from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, at the piano; Max Weinberg on drums; Rick Derringer on guitar; Steve Buslowe on bass; and Dave LeBolt adding synthesizer. Steinman and John Jansen produced.
Bittan’s piano is the arrangement’s engine. Where Creedence lean on a loping country-rock groove, the Tyler version opens into a rolling, gospel-tinged grandeur, and one critic at Classic Rock History described the result as a kind of Meat Loaf-meets-Springsteen hybrid, with Bittan’s piano shining through it. Tyler sings the song straight through the middle of it all — no melisma, no showing off, just that sandpaper voice insisting on the question. The lyric she inherits is about dread disguised as weather; the performance treats it as defiance. It is a canny reading: Fogerty’s song is about success curdling, and Tyler, who had watched her own first success curdle, sings it like someone who has decided the rain can fall on somebody else this time.
Release and Reception
Have You Ever Seen the Rain? was released as the album’s third single on 17 June 1983, with Time as its B-side — the third of no fewer than seven singles the album would eventually yield in one territory or another. The album campaign was by then dominated by Total Eclipse of the Heart, and the single charted modestly in comparison: number 47 in the UK, number 13 in Ireland, number 63 in West Germany and number 69 in Australia. Steinman-produced singles were events as album tracks and afterthoughts as 45s — this one, like the title track before it, performed its real work on the LP, where it opened a record that topped the UK chart and went platinum in America.
Its video is among the most atmospheric of Tyler’s career. Filmed at night in the grounds of Waverley Abbey House in Surrey — near the abbey ruins where the title track’s video was shot — it follows Tyler carrying a candle through dark gardens, throwing open wooden shutters to let in bright light, and singing from windows, before a closing sequence in daylight. Storm, darkness, then brightness: the imagery rhymes with the song’s sunshower idea almost too neatly.
Among the Many Rains
Few rock standards have been covered as persistently. Boney M. took it to the disco floor on Love for Sale in 1977; Johnny Cash recorded it for his 1985 album Rainbow; Joan Jett and the Blackhearts included it on The Hit List in 1990; Rod Stewart sang it on his 2006 covers album Still the Same… Great Rock Classics of Our Time; and Willie Nelson duetted on it with his daughter Paula for To All the Girls… in 2013. It has also been remade repeatedly in other languages, including Ana Gabriel’s Spanish version, Ven a ver llover.
It has been anthologised on Tyler’s compilations ever since, including the 1993 collection Bonnie Tyler: The Best. Tyler’s version occupies a special place in that lineage — not the most famous cover, but arguably the most consequential for its singer. It was the handshake between Tyler and Steinman, the overture to the biggest album of her life, and the announcement that the country-pop chapter was closed. Four decades later it was still doing that job: her anniversary tour celebrating forty years of Total Eclipse of the Heart opened its concerts, fittingly, with Have You Ever Seen the Rain? — the song that first proved a Welsh club singer could take one of rock’s most familiar questions and make the whole world hear it fresh.