I'm No Stranger To The Rain

Album: Don't Close Your Eyes (1988)
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Songfacts®:

  • Country singer Keith Whitley went in to recording his second album, Don't Close Your Eyes, while still battling his demons. RCA was confident he had the talent to become a superstar, but was unwilling to put up with his alcoholism, which was interfering with his work and their profits. The label gave him an ultimatum: Clean up his act or find another home. Whitley opted for the former and found validation in the track "I'm No Stranger To The Rain," a poignant song about withstanding life's storms.

    "That song is kind of autobiographical to me," Whitley admitted in The Billboard Book Of Number One Country Hits. "Although I didn't write the song, I could very well have written it. It really deals with survival. The line in that song that made me know I wanted to record it comes in that first verse:

    I fought with the devil
    Got down on is level
    But I never gave in
    So he gave up on me


    I could really identify very strongly with that particular line."

    Unfortunately, it was the last single released in Whitley's lifetime. In 1989, his demons got the better of him and he died of alcohol poisoning at age 34.
  • This was written by Sonny Curtis, a pop and country songwriter who performed with Buddy Holly's band The Crickets in the late '50s, and Ron Hellard, a Nashville songwriter who went on to co-write the Billy Dean hit "If There Hadn't Been You."

    In a 2015 interview with The Tennessean, Hellard recalled how he and Curtis were grasping at straws when the title popped into his head.

    "We had four writing sessions on this thing," he said. "After lunch, we went back to his office, and I was trying to come up with something for us to write. I was spitting out titles of this and that, and 'I'm No Stranger To The Rain' just popped into my head. I don't know where from ... Sonny says, 'Whoa! Let's back up. That 'Stranger' thing sounds really interesting.' So we wrote it, and it took us about four days to write that song until we were really satisfied with it. We knew we had done good work. I had no emotional involvement in the song at the time, but we were really happy with it."

    A couple years later, Whitley's producer Garth Fundis got a hold of the track and played it for the singer. "And Keith said, 'Man, somebody's been reading my mail!'"
  • Hellard didn't understand the meaning of his own song until he endured tragedy in the years after its release. He explained:

    "When we wrote the song, we thought we'd done good work, but it had no emotional tie to me at all, really. Then I went through some hard times. I lost my dad. That was devastating to me because my dad hung the moon, and I've got the paperwork to prove it. I almost didn't get over that for a long time. I happened to turn on the radio, and there was 'I'm No Stranger To The Rain,' and I realized what the song was about then. It was a song about redemption, really. 'I'll put this cloud behind me/That's how the man designed me.' It was like coming back 20 years later and patting yourself on the back, saying 'It's going to be OK.' You're talking to yourself, really."
  • This was one of three #1 hits on the Country chart from Don't Close Your Eyes. The others were "When You Say Nothing At All" and the title track.
  • This was named Single of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards in 1989.
  • Joe Diffie covered this for the 1994 album Keith Whitley: A Tribute.
  • This was used in the 2021 movie Stillwater, starring Matt Damon.

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