Most breakup songs arrive as an argument. This one arrived as a piece of mail. “In Your Letter” is three minutes and fourteen seconds of pure early-1960s sunshine wrapped around one of the coldest goodbyes in rock: a man comes home, finds a note on the kitchen table, and learns that his marriage is over — in writing. REO Speedwagon turned that note into the fourth single from Hi Infidelity, and in the autumn of 1981 it carried the strangest true story on the album all the way to No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The song was written by Gary Richrath, the band’s lead guitarist and, alongside frontman Kevin Cronin, one of its two songwriting engines. If Cronin supplied the piano ballads, Richrath supplied the bite — and yet “In Your Letter” is the gentlest thing he ever wrote for the band, a doo-wop-flavoured pop song built on a chord sequence the Beatles would have recognised. Underneath the bounce, though, sits a lyric full of genuine bitterness, because the letter in the song was real.
The Letter on the Kitchen Table
Richrath did not invent the scenario. According to Cronin, the song was inspired by something that happened to the band’s keyboard player, Neal Doughty. At the end of a tour, Doughty came home to find a letter from his wife waiting on the kitchen table, informing him that she had left him for another man. The other man, it turned out, was the person who supplied the band with their illegal substances. Cronin has retold the story for years, and its punchline belongs to Doughty himself, whose reported response to the catastrophe was a masterpiece of misplaced priorities: “I’m really gonna miss that guy.”
It is a funny story, and Richrath kept the humour — but he also kept the sting. The lyric addresses the absent woman directly and accuses her of cowardice as much as betrayal: she hid behind her “poison pen” rather than say it to his face. Vintage-rock critic Casandra Armour singled out the lyric’s “cutting accusations with cruel alliteration,” and the song never lets the writer of the letter off the hook. The narrator has been dumped by post, and the whole record is his reply — the answer she never gave him the chance to deliver in person.
There is a nice symmetry in who wrote it. Richrath was the band member least associated with domestic pop songwriting; his reputation rested on muscular rockers like “Ridin’ the Storm Out” and “Take It on the Run.” Yet when the raw material was a bandmate’s real humiliation, Richrath reached not for a power chord but for the oldest pop machinery he knew.
A ’50s Song Wearing 1980 Clothes
Cronin has said that in its original form the song was very simple — almost a 1950s doo-wop melody and chord structure. Its chords ran G major, E minor, C major, D major, the same classic progression that underpins the Beatles’ “This Boy.” That skeleton survived into the finished record, and the critics heard it immediately. AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the track a “sun-kissed ’60s homage” and a “great album track.” Billboard heard “the spunky charm of a 1960s pop song.” Glide Magazine described the sound of a “1950s sock hop,” while Australia’s The Age was less charmed, calling it a “grimly uptempo 60s style whinge.”
The arrangement walks a careful line between homage and the band’s own arena-rock identity. Richrath plays both 6-string and 12-string electric guitars, and the 12-string’s chime is a large part of the record’s period glow. Doughty — the man whose letter it was — plays acoustic piano, an irony the band can hardly have missed in the studio. Cronin sings lead and plays acoustic guitar, Bruce Hall holds down the bass and Alan Gratzer the drums, and the stacked backing vocals come from the band plus two ringers who recur throughout the Hi Infidelity story: Tom Kelly and Richard Page, with an additional credit to the mysterious “N Yolletta.” A demo version included on the album’s 30th anniversary edition reveals yet another layer, with the guitar part leaning toward rockabilly.
The result is a record that sounds like a prom slow-dance played at double speed: bright, harmonised and smiling on the surface, furious underneath. That tension — the sunniest music on the album carrying its most spiteful lyric — is exactly why the song works, and why it has outlasted many straighter rockers.
Fourth Song on the Biggest Album of the Year
Placement matters on a ten-track album, and “In Your Letter” was given a prime seat. On the original vinyl it sat fourth on side one of Hi Infidelity, in the middle of an extraordinary run of songs: “Don’t Let Him Go,” “Keep On Loving You,” “Follow My Heart,” then “In Your Letter,” then “Take It on the Run” closing the side. Four of those five tracks became American singles, and three of them reached the Top 40. Sequenced between a Richrath–Tom Kelly collaboration and Richrath’s own biggest hit, “In Your Letter” was the side’s moment of levity — the deep breath of 1960s pop between the album’s opening urgency and its anthemic finale.
It also served the album’s theme. Hi Infidelity is, as its punning title announces, a record about cheating: the singer of “Keep On Loving You” has discovered betrayal and resolves to love anyway; “Take It on the Run” is built entirely on second-hand accusations of it. “In Your Letter” completes the triangle from a third angle — betrayal already accomplished, discovered not through rumour or confession but through paperwork. Richrath wrote two of the album’s four hit singles, and the contrast between them defines his range: “Take It on the Run” is accusation as arena rock, all acoustic strum and soaring solo, while “In Your Letter” is accusation as pop — shorter, sweeter and, in its way, colder.
The Single Epic Wanted Second
By the time “In Your Letter” was released as a single in July 1981, with “Shakin’ It Loose” on the B-side, Hi Infidelity had become a phenomenon. Released on 21 November 1980, the album spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, became the best-selling album of 1981 in the United States and was eventually certified Diamond for sales of more than ten million copies. Its first two singles had rewritten the band’s career: “Keep On Loving You” reached No. 1 in March 1981, and Richrath’s “Take It on the Run” followed it to No. 5.
What is less well known is that “In Your Letter” was nearly promoted much earlier. Epic Records originally wanted it to be the follow-up single to “Keep On Loving You,” and KRTH program director Bob Hamilton called it “the most mass appeal cut” on the album and “the strongest cut on the album.” The band insisted instead that “Take It on the Run” should be the second single — a decision history has vindicated — and “Don’t Let Him Go” came third. “In Your Letter” finally emerged as the fourth single, a year into the album’s chart life.
Even arriving late, it performed. The single peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 — chart records date its peak to late September 1981 — and at No. 26 on Billboard‘s Adult Contemporary chart. In Canada it reached No. 34 on the RPM singles chart, while the American trade papers Cash Box and Record World both placed it at No. 28 and Radio & Records at No. 17. Billboard‘s single review praised a record “filled with melody and solid hooks,” and Record World called it “a fluffy pop ditty straight from the early sixties,” which, whatever the writers intended, was close to a description of the design.
Afterlife of a Poison Pen
The song’s afterlife has been quietly persistent. It was covered the very next year, in 1982, by the doo-wop revival group Randy and the Rainbows — a fitting tribute, given the song’s roots — on their album C’mon Let’s Go. In 1989 the Japanese idol group Wink recorded a Japanese-language version for their album Twin Memories. Richrath himself revisited the song on his 1992 solo album Only the Strong Survive, reclaiming it three years after leaving the band he had helped build.
When Richrath died in September 2015, at the age of 65, the song’s standing in his catalogue was confirmed by others: Guitar Aficionado included “In Your Letter” among his ten finest moments with the band, and several obituaries named it among REO Speedwagon’s biggest hits. It also earned a place on compilations including The Essential REO Speedwagon.
Not everyone was converted. Philippa Hawker of The Age complained that the song is only bearable if you enjoy hearing its title phrase repeated “many, many times.” It is a fair description of the hook, if not of its effect: the cheerful repetition is the point. A man reading the worst letter of his life cannot get the words out of his head, so the song cannot either. Richrath built a perfect little machine in which a real bandmate’s worst day at home became three minutes of radio sunshine — and the sunshine, forty years on, is still what you hear first. The bitterness only arrives, as it did for Neal Doughty, once you actually read the letter.