Reclaiming My Voice

My new album, "Revival,"comes by its title naturally—a return to making the kind of music I became known for early in my career. I get a real feeling of being back where I belong. But I didn't just decide to do that. I was in need of another kind of revival before that music could be created.

Twenty-one years ago I was a castaway—a drifter, floating along with the stream. Not plotting a course or even aiming for a destination point. I was filled with anger and hurt and at the same time, weirdly subdued; depressed. Just a year earlier I'd released a No. 1 solo album to wildly enthusiastic acclaim. How did things get so bad?

It began back in the early '70s. After leading my band Creedence Clearwater Revival through the most amazing three years that any band has ever had, the group collapsed, and disintegrated with a rather frightening level of jealousy and betrayal. I spent much of the next 30 years in litigation, battling with my record label, music publisher and former bandmates to protect the artistic integrity of my music and my financial rights to what I'd created. By the mid-1980s the emotional and financial toll of fighting these battles for so long came to a head. One day I was giving yet another deposition and found myself so angry that I couldn't remember my own address or telephone number! I remember going into a department store and being so fearful and dysfunctional that I could not ask a salesperson about buying a pair of socks. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't feel. Music was who I was and I could not understand why or how I could lose so much.

But everything changed one night in September 1986. I was on tour in Indianapolis. I'd wandered into a club near the hotel. After about 15 minutes, I had decided to leave, but suddenly the shadows parted. There she was. I actually said to myself, "That's the most beautiful girl I have ever seen." Her name was Julie. It was extremely lucky that we met at all. Julie was helping her sister move across the state and they had stopped in Indy for a break. They were just about to leave. Fifteen minutes—either way—and we would never have met.

We fell in love. Let me say that again. We fell in love. To me there is no more meaningful occurrence in this life. Though I had been married once before, in Julie I experienced what happens when another person becomes more important than one's self. I learned the concept of sharing—that's a big one. My psyche at the time was in such bad shape. I was a self-destructive mess. But in Julie I had total acceptance, something I'd never felt. She became my wife, my love, my best friend. Finally, my heart began healing. Meeting Julie opened that path.

Steeped in anger and hurt, I'd chosen not to play any Creedence Clearwater Revival songs—no "Fortunate Son," no "Bad Moon Rising," no "Born on the Bayou"—since 1972. But in 1987, less than a year after meeting Julie, I played them again for the first time at a concert in Washington, D.C., for Vietnam Veterans. It felt good. But you don't just snap your fingers and everything gets better. For a few years after that, whenever Creedence music would come on the radio, I still had to change the channel. I wouldn't pick up a guitar.