Have You Ever Seen the Rain is a song written by John Fogerty and released as a single in 1971 from the album Pendulum (1970) by roots rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival. Images of water were a common recurring theme in John Fogertys songwriting, which held a variety of symbolic meanings, and he often returned to the notion of rain as a portent of troubling events to come. One such example was Have You Ever Seen the Rain, which first appeared on the groups 1970 album Pendulum, though in this case the rain seemed to represent an unpleasant reality that lurked beneath the surfaces of our lives and our world. Someone told me long ago/Theres a calm before the storm/I know -- its been coming for some time, Fogerty sings with a passion thats cut with sadness, though when he reaches the chorus and asks I wanna know -- have you ever seen the rain/Comin down on a sunny day? its obvious that the rain is always there, but that not all of us choose to see it. In 1970, a time when the giddy possibilities of political and social change of the late 60s had been put in check by the sobering realities of Altamont and Kent State and both rock & roll and the youth culture at large were beginning to move away from idealism and into the self-centered decadence of the 70s, Fogerty was one of the few songwriters grounded enough to suggest the issues had not gone away, but that we had lost the courage and the vision to face up to them.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 02:00:00 +0000