“What Are You Gonna Do” is a hard question asked softly—a plea for someone to choose love and adulthood over the gravity of the past.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “What Are You Gonna Do” arrived not as a single, not as a radio banner, but as a revealing chapter inside the band’s most complicated farewell. It sits at the start of side two (track 6 overall) on Mardi Gras, released April 11, 1972—CCR’s final studio album. The album still carried the weight of their name: it entered the U.S. chart at No. 63 on April 29, 1972, rose to No. 12, and stayed for 24 weeks, earning Gold status in the U.S. Yet behind those numbers was a band already splintering, trying to sound like a united front while living like a divided house.
And that’s exactly why this song matters.
Unlike the classic CCR singles driven by John Fogerty—the raucous bark, the swamp-rock certainty—“What Are You Gonna Do” is written and sung by drummer Doug Clifford, and it’s only 2:42 long. Those facts are not footnotes. They change the emotional temperature. On Mardi Gras, the band deliberately “shared” writing, lead vocals, and production across the remaining trio (Fogerty, Stu Cook, Doug Clifford) after Tom Fogerty had left. The result is an album that feels like three different diaries bound into one cover—sometimes charming, sometimes uneasy, always historically charged.
In “What Are You Gonna Do,” Clifford steps out from behind the kit and speaks in a voice that isn’t mythic, isn’t larger-than-life—just human. The lyric centers on a lover who seems pulled away by family influence, and the song keeps returning to its blunt, almost parental refrain: what are you gonna do?—as if love is no longer a feeling but a decision that must finally be made. Even a single repeated detail in the lyric—urging someone to stop letting “your mother” steer the relationship—lands with surprising force because it’s so ordinary, so painfully believable.
That ordinariness is the song’s quiet strength. Most CCR anthems feel like they’re carved from American landscape—rivers, bayous, highways, weather. This one feels carved from a kitchen-table argument at 1 a.m., when nobody is trying to “win,” and the real fear is that tomorrow will arrive with the same unresolved ache. It’s a song about being tired of circular conversations. About wanting someone to step out of the comfort of old loyalties and into the risk of a grown-up future.
And if you listen with the band’s situation in mind, the subtext becomes almost haunting.
The Mardi Gras sessions were marked by bitter tension, and the band’s internal arrangement—who got to write, who got to sing, who got to steer—was no longer a settled truth. When Clifford sings “What are you gonna do?” it can sound like a lover’s ultimatum, yes—but it also echoes like a question hanging over the band itself. What do you do when the old order is gone? When the engine that powered your greatest records is still there, but the sense of shared purpose has thinned? When you’re trying to keep moving because stopping would mean admitting the end?
It’s telling, too, that Mardi Gras still produced two Fogerty-penned singles—“Sweet Hitch-Hiker” and “Someday Never Comes”—and that audiences tended to respond most strongly when Fogerty’s familiar voice was at the center. Yet the album is also a snapshot of the other two men insisting they were more than supporting players. “What Are You Gonna Do” is one of the places where that insistence doesn’t feel like politics—it feels like personality.
Musically, the track doesn’t try to out-swamp the swamp. It moves in a brisk, plainspoken rock feel—tight, serviceable, more bar-band than myth-making. The charm is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. You can almost hear the practical musician’s instinct: get in, tell the truth, get out. And that brevity—those 2 minutes and 42 seconds—makes the plea more believable. It’s not indulgent. It’s not dramatic. It’s the sound of someone who has reached the end of patience and is trying, one last time, to be understood.
In the long view, “What Are You Gonna Do” becomes part of CCR’s final recorded message, whether they intended it or not. The band officially announced their breakup on October 16, 1972, only months after the album’s release. That date casts a shadow backward: every shared-vocal experiment, every attempt at democracy, every moment of “we can still make this work” starts to feel like the last sunlight before evening.
So if you come to this track expecting the thunder of “Proud Mary” or “Bad Moon Rising,” you may miss its point. “What Are You Gonna Do” is not the sound of a band conquering the world. It’s the sound of people trying to negotiate a way forward—romantically in the lyric, historically in the context—when the forces pulling them apart are older, deeper, and harder to argue with than a simple disagreement.
And that’s why the song stays with you. Because sooner or later, everyone meets a moment where love, work, family, identity—something—demands an answer that can’t be postponed. What are you gonna do? In 1972, Creedence Clearwater Revival asked it without fireworks, without prophecy—just a steady voice from the back of the band, finally stepping forward, and telling the truth the only way it can be told: plainly, and too late to be painless.