John Fogerty has nothing left to prove, but in his 80th year the Grammy-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is still finding new ways to honor his legacy and that of his former band. The Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman, whose voice and songs have become cornerstones of American music, is marking the milestone with Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, a new album of freshly recorded versions of 20 CCR classics.

The idea took root after Fogerty finally secured the publishing rights to his catalog in 2023, ending a decades-long battle with former label Fantasy Records. Realizing he would never own the original recordings, his wife Julie suggested recutting them with his family band. Fogerty embraced the challenge, striving to match every guitar lick, drum fill, and vocal inflection from the originals. “Either you are going to be way different, or you are going to try your best to sound exactly the same,” he says. “That was a cool challenge.”

It was also a demanding one. Fogerty revisited decades-old arrangements with the precision of a forensic musicologist, sometimes relearning the very techniques he used as a young man. His son Shane often spotted details he had forgotten, forcing him to shake off fifty years of bad habits to nail the exact feel of the early Creedence records. The result is a set that captures the energy, grit, and urgency that first made those songs timeless, while adding the warmth and perspective of a lifetime in music.

The project reunites him with the songs that powered one of rock’s most remarkable runs, which included fourteen consecutive Top 10 singles and five straight Top 10 albums between 1969 and 1971. That streak produced “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Born on the Bayou,” and “Fortunate Son.” Legacy also caps a year that saw him give a keynote at SXSW, headline JazzFest, Glastonbury, and the Hollywood Bowl, and receive the American Music Honors award from Bruce Springsteen.

For Fogerty, Legacy is as much personal as it is public. Decades of lawsuits had once forced him to separate his emotional connection to his own work from its legal ownership. Regaining control of his publishing rights has transformed that relationship. “For most of my life I did not own the songs I had written,” he says. “Getting them back changes everything."