A familiar riff, a different kind of rescue — “Up Around the Bend” (2020) turns a road-song into a room-song, hope scaled to a family living room and a hard year.
First, the anchors older ears ask for. John Fogerty’s classic “Up Around the Bend” was written and produced by Fogerty and rushed to tape just days before CCR’s April 1970 European tour; released as a double-A side with “Run Through the Jungle,” it hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 3 in the U.K., and anchored Cosmo’s Factory that July (which went on to sit nine weeks at U.S. No. 1). That’s the original paper trail—the bright hook you could hum before the first chorus ended.
In the first quiet weeks of lockdown, Fogerty gathered his kids—Shane, Tyler, and Kelsy—and started filming basement sessions under a homemade banner: Fogerty’s Factory. The weekly videos (shot and posted by the family) became a small ritual for a lot of us; the project grew into a 7-song digital EP released on Fogerty’s 75th birthday, May 28, 2020, and later an expanded 12-track album on November 20, 2020. It wasn’t a marketing plan so much as a lifeline: familiar songs, played shoulder-to-shoulder, for a world that needed steadiness.
“Up Around the Bend” showed up there like a postcard from brighter weather. One take—posted in May—finds the family trading smiles as that high-string lick snaps to attention and the room answers back with hand-tight harmony. No lasers, no crowd roar; just a kitchen-table groove and a chorus that still lands like an open door. The Fogertys even had a little fun with history, recreating the Cosmo’s Factory cover as a wink to the song’s birthplace and to the studio muscle memory that built it 50 years earlier.
About the charts—because you asked for position at release: the 2020 performance of “Up Around the Bend” wasn’t worked as its own commercial single and did not chart. The album Fogerty’s Factory did make a modest showing, reaching the U.S. album chart at No. 63—a neat bit of bookkeeping for what was essentially a family scrapbook released in a season when most of us were just trying to keep the lights on. The original 1970 single remains the chart horse; the 2020 cut is the keepsake.
What changes in 2020 isn’t the melody or even the tempo—it’s the scale and the meaning. In 1970, the song was a summons: there’s a place up ahead—leave the noise, follow the flare. In the family version, that invitation shrinks to the size of a household and somehow grows larger at the same time. Shane threads the signature riff with a son’s easy authority; Tyler tucks harmonies under his father’s rasp; Kelsy brings light in all the right corners. The lyric stops being strictly about a road and starts sounding like a daily practice: keep going, even when “going” means moving from the sofa to the guitars and back again. The hope is lived-in, not theoretical.
Listen with seasoned ears and you’ll hear the courtesy that made Fogerty’s songs durable in the first place. The 2020 “Up Around the Bend” doesn’t inflate itself. The backbeat walks, not struts; the guitars glow, not bark; and the title line opens its vowels the way it always did, inviting a room to sing along—even if the room, this time, is a basement with family pictures on the wall. It’s a reminder that joy doesn’t always arrive with spectacle; sometimes it wears house shoes.
Context sweetens the memory. Those Fogerty’s Factory clips—Tiny Desk (Home) Concert included—were little broadcasts of neighborly steadiness at a moment when the calendar had slipped its gears. Setlists tilted toward the comfort foods (“Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” “Long As I Can See the Light,” “Proud Mary”), but when “Up Around the Bend” arrived, you could feel why Fogerty saved that riff for days that needed a lift. The promise was unchanged; the witness was new: a father passing a song—his song—to the kids who’d grown up on its echo.
So file “Up Around the Bend (2020)” where it belongs: not as an “update,” but as a home-made benediction. The 1970 single gave us a map; the 2020 family take shows us how to keep using it when the highway is closed and the world feels small. In three compact minutes, John Fogerty and his children do what the best old songs always do when they meet a new season—they hold the room together and point, gently, up around the bend.