“Headlines” reads like a late-night conscience check—John Fogerty staring down the news cycle and asking what it’s doing to our nerves, our values, and our sense of home.
The key facts first, because they place the song in its proper historical frame. “Headlines” is a John Fogerty original (he wrote all the songs on the album) and it appears as track 3 on his 1986 studio album Eye of the Zombie, released September 29, 1986. The album reached No. 26 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and was certified Gold by the RIAA. Importantly, Eye of the Zombie was Fogerty’s first solo album recorded with a backing band, a shift that subtly changes the way his songs move—less like solitary dispatches, more like street-level reports with muscle behind them. “Headlines” itself was not the project’s featured chart single (the title track “Eye of the Zombie” was released as a single), so it doesn’t come with a clean “debut chart position” the way radio-driven singles do.
Now—the sound and the sting of it.
If you’ve lived long enough to watch the world speed up, you already understand the ache that “Headlines” presses on. Fogerty wrote it in the mid-1980s, when television news was louder, faster, and more theatrical than it had been in earlier decades—when the living room became a kind of front-row seat to a constant parade of urgency. In that atmosphere, “Headlines” lands like a refusal to be hypnotized. It’s not a lecture; it’s a weary, sharp-eyed witness statement.
Fogerty has always had a gift for turning “America” into something you can feel under your boots: a back road, a riverbank, a porch light, a working town at dusk. On Eye of the Zombie, that gift doesn’t disappear—but it grows a darker edge. The album’s very premise circles anxiety: social unease, moral fog, the sense that something is stalking the national imagination. The record’s reception was famously mixed, and Fogerty himself largely left this material behind in concert for many years—details that only make “Headlines” feel more like an unsealed time capsule.
What makes “Headlines” endure is how it captures a psychological truth that’s even more recognizable now: the way repeated exposure to alarm can start to feel like a kind of weather inside the mind. There’s a particular fatigue that comes from being told, every day, that everything is breaking. Fogerty doesn’t deny that the world can be dangerous; instead, he questions what the constant performance of danger does to the listener—how it can flatten empathy, distort priorities, and make ordinary goodness feel naïve.
Musically, the song’s placement early on Side One matters. It arrives before the album fully stretches into its longer, more apocalyptic moods, almost like a headline itself—shorter, pointed, meant to grab you by the collar. And yet it’s not merely “angry.” Fogerty’s best writing rarely is. Even when he’s taking aim, there’s always the ghost of a more tender desire: that we might look away from the sensational long enough to remember what we love, what we owe one another, what we want our country—our community, our families—to feel like when the TV is off.
In the end, “Headlines” is one of those songs that grows more human with time. It doesn’t rely on a single reference that expires; it relies on a feeling that returns in cycles—especially in anxious eras. Put it on today and you can still hear the 1986 room it came from: the late-night glow of a television, the uneasy quiet after the broadcast ends, and one unmistakable voice—John Fogerty—reminding you that information is not wisdom, and that a life can’t be lived at the volume of breaking news.