“Today I Started Loving You Again” is the country paradox in one gentle phrase: love that ended yesterday can return this morning, as if the heart never signed the divorce papers.
To place John Fogerty’s recording in the clearest light, the song’s lineage matters. “Today I Started Loving You Again” was written by Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens and first appeared in 1968 as the B-side to Haggard’s No. 1 hit “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde”—a heartbreak classic that, in its earliest life, didn’t even chart on its own as an A-side statement. That detail feels almost symbolic: some truths arrive quietly, tucked behind louder headlines, then spend the rest of their lives outlasting the noise.
Fogerty’s version comes from an equally telling moment of reinvention. He recorded it for his 1973 solo debut The Blue Ridge Rangers, released April 1973—an album issued under a fictitious band name with no mention of Fogerty on the original cover, and performed as a one-man band with Fogerty playing all the instruments. The album peaked at No. 47 on the charts. And on that record—made entirely of traditional and country covers—“Today I Started Loving You Again” lands like a slow exhale at the end of the journey, the kind of closing track that doesn’t wave goodbye so much as turn the porch light down and let the night speak.
That context changes what you hear.
Because John Fogerty, coming out of the whirlwind aftermath of Creedence Clearwater Revival, could have tried to “prove” himself by chasing a new sound, a new image, a new kind of rock prestige. Instead, he disappeared into older songs—music that predates the arguments, the contracts, the mythology. The Blue Ridge Rangers is Fogerty stepping back into the American root cellar, running his hand over the jars on the shelf, choosing what still tastes like home. And when he chooses “Today I Started Loving You Again,” he chooses a song that understands human weakness without mocking it.
The genius of this lyric is its honesty about relapse—not the destructive kind, but the tender kind. The narrator doesn’t claim enlightenment. He doesn’t promise he’ll never fall again. He just admits the moment it happens: today—not someday—he started loving her again. That word “today” is the whole wound. It implies there were days he didn’t. Or days he tried not to. It implies effort, pride, exhaustion, and then—without warning—the old feeling returning like a familiar scent in the air.
Fogerty sings it with a different kind of gravity than Merle’s weary elegance. His voice has always carried a grain of urgency, a slight rasp that sounds like truth scraped against the world. In this setting, that grain becomes tenderness. You can feel a man who knows that love doesn’t always return with dignity; sometimes it returns like a sudden ache in the chest—uninvited, undeniable, almost embarrassing in its sincerity. And because Fogerty plays everything himself on the album, the performance has a private-room intimacy: it feels less like a production and more like a confession captured before he changed his mind.
There’s a special kind of nostalgia in that, especially now. Not nostalgia for a decade, but nostalgia for a way songs used to behave—patient, plainspoken, built to last longer than a season. “Today I Started Loving You Again” doesn’t need clever hooks or dramatic twists. Its drama is internal: the quiet moment you realize you’re not as “over it” as you pretended. The moment you understand that the heart keeps its own calendar, and it doesn’t consult your pride before it turns the page.
So Fogerty’s reading becomes more than a cover. It becomes a portrait of a man stepping away from the spotlight’s harsh expectations and leaning into something older and truer: a song that forgives the listener for being human. In the end, “Today I Started Loving You Again” isn’t about going backward—it’s about admitting that love, when it was real, doesn’t always leave cleanly. Sometimes it simply goes quiet… and then one morning, for reasons you can’t explain, it begins again.