(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Sat 6 December 2025 15:55, UK
The key to being a good songwriter is telling the truth whenever they sit down with a guitar. The biggest crime any musician can commit is being inauthentic when they step up to the microphone, given that it doesn’t take long for people to sense when someone is poorly faking it. John Fogerty, however, epitomised authenticity with Creedence Clearwater Revival. When he started writing his first songs, he believed that Brian Wilson had perfectly captured this essence with the track ‘In My Room’.
If The Beatles had turned rock music upside down for England in the 1960s, The Beach Boys would have been doing the exact same thing on the other side of the Atlantic. Sure, many of their songs were mindless odes to fun when they started, but Wilson was slowly festering in the background, waiting for the right moment to let his genius fly.
Compared to most other songwriters, Wilson never claimed to be the genius that he was every day. He was happier to lay back and play music with his friends, but the fact that he could pull a lot of his greatest melodies out of the air with little to no help is the kind of thing one would expect out of Mozart or Beethoven rather than the guy who wrote ‘Surfin USA’.
Of all the songs he wrote in the group’s early years, though, ‘In My Room’ is one of the more openly honest tunes he ever put to tape. As opposed to talking about going out with a girl or the wonders of surfing or hot rods, Wilson is singing about being completely free to be himself whenever he’s left to his own devices
Although most people were taken aback to hear this kind of song on the radio, Fogerty believed every single word he said. When discussing his favourite tunes, the CCR frontman claimed that Wilson cut to the root of everything on this song, saying, “Songwriting peers I admire include Lennon & McCartney, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John & Bernie Taupin and Brian Wilson. You know that Brian Wilson song ‘In My Room’? It’s the truth.”
John Fogerty playing his guitar. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
“When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night, I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them, and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it,” he recalled of those young days as this song became the first that the core of The Beach Boys learnt to perform together. It was the spark of everything that was to come.
“In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears, in my room,” Wilson sings with the world of his own bedroom being a comfortable prison at that point, a place where he hid from everything and pretended that it was soothing. Of all The Beach Boys songs, ‘In My Room’ is perhaps the most traditional: shades of Barbershop and classical harmony mix with strong doo-wop influences to create their own sun-soaked version of a standard late 1950s and early ’60s ballad.
While a song about being a bit of a loner doesn’t seem like it should be in the conversation of the greatest of all time, it might be one of those things exclusive only to songwriters. Beyond the lyrics, the chord progression was the star of the more progressive moments that Wilson would get up to later, including the musical symphonies he would create on ‘Good Vibrations’.
That kind of honesty also bled into what Fogerty would do later. Despite sounding halfway between rock and roll country, much of CCR’s greatest material also related to the truths of life, whether it was the fear of getting drafted on ‘Fortunate Son’ or something as simple as rolling downstream on a riverboat in ‘Proud Mary’.
But maybe it’s about something much deeper. Yeah, a song about being in one’s room is probably not supposed to be pored over like Shakespeare, but for a songwriter, being alone with their thoughts and getting to translate them either on a guitar or piano is one of the great joys that life can bring. That way, your guitar isn’t just an emotional translator. It’s your best friend, and when you’re in that space, nothing can get in the way of those feelings.
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