10 Perfect Rock Songs Wasted On Terrible Albums

There aren’t that many final albums that can really beat the dumpster fire that happened with CCR’s Mardi Gras. After losing John Fogerty’s brother Tom after getting into one too many creative disagreements, the band’s decision to become a democracy just led to more trouble, with John not wanting to play on songs by the other guys and no one really matching the same intensity that John had anyhow. Out of all the mud that you have to sift through on this album though, we do get one shining light right in the middle of the record.

Around the same time that John was working on this album, he was also going through a fairly messy divorce, and Someday Never Comes was his way to sort of work out his feelings in song. Framed as a talk between a kid and his dad, this entire song encapsulates the feeling of being right in the middle of that messy divorce, as you see both of these people slowly falling out of love with each other and praying for some sort of relief that’s never actually going to happen.

This is the kind of the classic Creedence stuff that most of us love…it’s just a shame that we have to sit through the other guys’ songs to get there. Apart from this one song, tracks like Stu Cook’s Take it Like a Friend is total amateur hour, and the rest of John’s songs aren’t much better, just sounding like he doesn’t even want to be there half the time. Although there might be a few blemishes in the recording here and there, Someday Never Comes doesn’t need to stand next to garbage songs to be perfect on its own.