Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” has reached a new kind of success, joining the Spotify Billions Club 55 years after its original release. Songs enter the club when they tally more than one billion streams on the platform.
Written by founding member John Fogerty, “Bad Moon Rising” was released as the lead single off Creedence Clearwater Revival’s third album Green River. The track peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in June of 1969, and reached number one in the U.K. in September of the same year.
The story goes that Fogerty wrote the song after watching the 1941 film The Devil And Daniel Webster, in which a hurricane destroys the crops of all local farmers except for the main character, who had made a deal with the devil. The imagery of that scene inspired the song’s apocalyptic lyrics, which Fogerty says he didn’t realize was at odds with the song’s upbeat melody until the band started recording. In 1993, he told Rolling Stone: “Here you got this song with all these hurricanes and blowing and raging ruin and all that, but it’s [snaps fingers] ‘I see a bad moon rising.’ It’s a happy-sounding tune, right? It didn’t bother me at the time.”
In 2013, Spotify conducted a poll to determine the most misheard song lyrics, and the song’s chorus “there’s a bad moon on the rise” ranked at number five, often heard as “there’s a bathroom on the right.” Fogerty sometimes changes it for fun, sharing, “in the wonderful tradition of rock & roll, people misconstrue the lyrics, and that’s what they thought I was singing. And when I hear the song on the radio now, I can see why they thought that – it does sound like it could be what I’m singing. So I do it for fun. I’m not one of these people that walks around going: ‘I’m a serious artist.’ I like to have fun.”
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