Dan Fogelberg – Rhythm Of The Rain

Dan Fogelberg’s cover of a 1962 classic hides a second one inside it — a piece of a Beatles song, quietly folded in and never credited on the sleeve.

Listen closely to Dan Fogelberg’s version of “Rhythm of the Rain” and you’ll catch something the label never printed. Woven through his dreamy, rain-soaked cover of the old Cascades hit is a piece of an entirely different song — the Beatles’ “Rain,” the 1966 Lennon and McCartney B-side, its melody surfacing like a memory inside the arrangement. It was never credited on the album sleeve. Two rain songs, a generation apart, quietly joined into one.

Keep watching: Dan Fogelberg – Same Old Lang Syne · explore more 90s →

Fogelberg recorded it for The Wild Places, his 1990 album built around themes of nature and preservation, on which he played nearly every instrument himself. By then the commercial peak of his career — the run of soft-rock hits that included “Leader of the Band” and “Same Old Lang Syne” — was behind him, but his craft hadn’t dimmed. His take on “Rhythm of the Rain” gave the song a lush, unhurried treatment, and it connected: it climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart in 1990, a genuine late-career hit, and became a fixture of his live shows.

The song he was reinterpreting was already one of the most beloved of its era. “Rhythm of the Rain” was written by John Claude Gummoe and first recorded by the Cascades in 1962, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1963. Cut at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles with some of the finest session players in the business — the drummer Hal Blaine and a young Glen Campbell on guitar among them — it became a standard almost immediately. BMI would later name it the ninth most-performed song of the entire twentieth century, and it has been recorded hundreds of times, from Neil Sedaka to Jason Donovan.

A songwriter’s homage, hidden in plain sound

What sets Fogelberg’s version apart from the hundreds of others is exactly that buried Beatles reference. It’s the kind of touch that rewards a careful listener — an artist paying tribute to two records he loved by letting them share the same three minutes, trusting that the people who noticed would smile and the people who didn’t would simply hear a beautiful cover. Fogelberg died in 2007, but that small, generous act of musical craft is still there every time the song plays: a hidden song inside a familiar one, waiting for anyone paying close enough attention to find it.