REO Speedwagon – Can’t Fight This Feeling
About The Song
“Can’t Fight This Feeling” is a power ballad performed by the American rock band REO Speedwagon. The song first appeared on the 1984 album Wheels Are Turnin’.
In this song, a man is falling in love with a girl he has been friends with for a long time. When the band had difficulty coming up with songs for their Wheels Are Turnin’ album, they took time off so each member could write alone. Lead singer Kevin Cronin went to Molokai, Hawaii, during his “time off.” There, he played around with a song that he wrote 10 years earlier but never finished. When he stopped tinkering with his composition, it had become a song about a person’s fear of change – even though he knows that he MUST change.
Kevin Cronin’s girlfriends have provided inspiration for several REO hits – he says this one is based on an amalgamation of these relationships, but the song has a deeper meaning.
“Really, what the song is about was about my inability to have the courage to express myself,” he said in a Songfacts interview. “I was brought up in an Irish-Catholic family, and you were taught to always keep a bright face, always act like everything was OK, even if maybe everything on the inside wasn’t so OK. So that’s something I’ve struggled with, and over the years have gotten better at.
At that time, the only way I knew to express those feelings was to write songs about them. I’ve learned over the years that it works better to talk to people! You can actually become closer to other human beings when you are vulnerable and express yourself and are free to tell the truth and to be honest and to be up front with your feelings. It does work. Back in those days, the best that I could do was write a song about it.”
This was the second of two #1 hits for REO Speedwagon, following “Keep On Loving You.” It was not the first single from the “Wheels Are Turnin'” album – that honor went to an uptempo track called “I Do’ Wanna Know,” which despite a funhouse video, reached only #29 in the US.