REO Speedwagon – Keep on Loving You

People play it at weddings. Kevin Cronin wrote it the night he learned his wife had been unfaithful.

Kevin Cronin walked into an REO Speedwagon rehearsal in 1980, sat down at the piano, an instrument he rarely touched in front of the band, and played a slow song he had written in the middle of the night. His bandmates looked at him, he said later, as if he had arrived from another planet. One of them asked whether he thought he was Barry Manilow. The verdict in the room was that this was not an REO Speedwagon song. Cronin answered that he was the band’s main songwriter, so it was one, and that turning it into one was their job. The song was Keep On Loving You.

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He had a reason to dig in. Cronin wrote it after learning that his wife had been unfaithful before they married, and the verses are closer to an accusation than a valentine. The lyric tells her she should have read it in his face, compares her to a snake lying still in the grass, and says he knows about the other men. Only then does the chorus arrive, and it is a decision, not a feeling: he is staying. Cronin has said the song stood for his belief that people can change, and that if a relationship is worth saving you “give it all you’ve got.”

What he brought to rehearsal, though, was a folk singer’s ballad, and the band he had rejoined in 1976 was a Midwestern hard-rock outfit built around Gary Richrath’s guitar. Cronin kept playing the chords anyway, session after session. Then one afternoon Richrath plugged a Les Paul into a Marshall stack and started hitting big chords over the chorus. Cronin’s first thought was that he was being drowned out. His second was that this was exactly what the song had been missing. The band cut it that way for Hi Infidelity, with Cronin, Richrath and Kevin Beamish producing, Neal Doughty on Hammond organ, and Tom Kelly and Richard Page among the backing singers.

A Band With No Hit Singles

Epic Records was no more convinced than the band had been. By Cronin’s account the label did not think the track was strong enough to be a single, and the group had to argue for it. Epic released it on November 4, 1980, ahead of the album on November 21. Nothing in REO Speedwagon’s history suggested what came next: in almost a decade of records, the best any of their singles had done was No.56, with Time for Me to Fly in 1978. On March 21, 1981, Billboard’s Hot 100 ranked Keep On Loving You No.1. The Official Charts Company placed it at No.7 in Britain, and the RIAA certified it platinum. The album did even better. Billboard’s album chart put Hi Infidelity at No.1 on February 21, 1981, kept it there for fifteen nonconsecutive weeks and named it the top album of the year; the RIAA has since certified it for ten million copies.

The Couch

The clip on this page, which the band’s channel titles the Video Version, wraps the performance in a small comedy. Cronin lies on a psychiatrist’s couch explaining his troubles to a female therapist, and at one point a woman picks up a telephone that turns out to be wired to Richrath’s guitar, a nod to a stage routine from the band’s older song 157 Riverside Avenue. Cronin has since called the couch scene “not my finest hour as a performer.” It did its work all the same. When MTV went on the air on August 1, 1981, this was the seventeenth video the channel played and the first Hot 100 No.1 hit it ever showed, one of several REO Speedwagon clips in rotation that first day.

The marriage ended in divorce anyway. The song did not end with it: couples still tell Cronin they chose it for their weddings, and he has said he wonders whether they listened to the verses. Dolly Parton recorded it with him as a duet for her 2023 album Rockstar. Richrath, whose guitar made the record, left the band in 1989 and died in 2015. Cronin has always insisted there was no strategy behind any of it, and that the power ballad his band is credited with popularizing was an accident. The evidence is on his side. The song works because of the collision the band tried to avoid: a hurt, private lyric that would have been too sweet on its own, and a loud guitar that had no business being there.