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John Fogerty has done what will surely soon become known as ‘a Taylor Swift’ and has re-recorded his back catalogue. Or at least some of it.
He released a greatest hits album, Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, on 22 August 2025. It consists of re-recordings of 20 of his best-known songs, including Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising and Down On The Corner and they are note-for-note re-creations of the originals, featuring the same rhythm section and the same guitar parts.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Fogerty outlined why he embarked on the project.
It seems that in 2023 he obtained a majority interest in the publishing rights of the Creedence back catalogue. His wife Julie then encouraged him into the remakes album though the veteran songwriter – who's now 80 – was initially sceptical.
“I didn’t want to have anything to do with that,” he says. “But then as time went on, I thought, ‘OK, I’ll stick my toe in the water and see how that is.’”
The other inspiration, he admits, was Swift, who embarked on her own re-recording project after her catalogue was sold to Scooter Braun in 2019, though this tale has a happy ending with Swift now in possession of her masters, having purchased them from previous owners, Shamrock Holdings.
“I understood her plight,” says Fogerty. “She’s had a wonderful career, and, of course, had saved a lot of money and was a major touring artist, so she was quite able to pay whatever amount the person that was going to sell it. I really felt for her at the time, because the guy was selling it to somebody else. That sort of thing has certainly happened to me.”
“I wanted to call it Taylor’s Version," he revealed, of the 'new' album. "I lobbied very much to the record company”: In the end, he was convinced to go for the somewhat less amusing title, Legacy.
Asked why old Creedence fans would want to fork out for note-for-note re-recordings of tracks they already own, he answered: “That’s a great question, because I asked that myself. But there’s a couple of things. Number one, there’s probably no chance in the world I will ever have any part of the ownership of the old masters. This is kind of the Taylor Swift part. But another thing is, I think there’s a joy quite evident in the music that may not be there in the original versions.”
Another reason (though he didn’t mention it) may be the huge success of the Swift re-recording program. The four albums she’s remade since 2019 have been worldwide best sellers, proving that fans actually WILL buy the same songs twice.
In a letter to fans on her website Swift has now confirmed that her original masters are finally under her ownership. "All of the music I've ever made now belongs to me," she wrote.
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