A quietly weary question about choice and consequence — “What Are You Gonna Do” stands like a final, pragmatic glance before someone closes the door.
“What Are You Gonna Do” is an album track by Creedence Clearwater Revival from their seventh and final studio LP, Mardi Gras, released April 11, 1972. The song was written and sung by drummer Doug Clifford, runs roughly 2:50–2:53, and appears among a group of tracks on an album notable for distributing songwriting and vocal duties across the band’s remaining members. The record was produced in the unusual three-way arrangement of Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and John Fogerty and recorded during sessions in 1971–1972.
Put plainly and early: this is not a John Fogerty composition, nor is it a hit single drawn from the band’s golden run. It is instead an object of the band’s late, awkward experiment—an ordinary song that carries the texture of everyday conversation and the marks of a group learning to share a creative steering wheel it had never willingly handed over before. That context is essential, because “What Are You Gonna Do” is less a desperate attempt at stadium glory than a modest, private reflection lodged inside a fraught farewell.
Musically the track is compact and workmanlike, the sort of short, direct piece that Creedence had always practiced so well: sturdy rhythm, plainspoken guitar, and a vocal delivered without theatrical flourish. Doug Clifford’s singing here is serviceable and unpretentious; it sounds like a neighbor explaining a small misfortune over the fence rather than an orator addressing a crowd. That conversational quality gives the song its emotional center. It is curiosity folded into resignation — a habitual question asked at the end of a long argument, when one is already half out the door. Listeners who have grown older with the band will recognise this tone immediately: the songs that speak quietly often keep you company the longest.
The story behind why the song exists where it does helps explain how it lands. By the time Mardi Gras was recorded, Creedence had lost Tom Fogerty and was navigating internal tensions over authorship and control. John Fogerty, who had been the band’s primary songwriter and guiding voice, contributed only a fraction of the material; in turn, Stu Cook and Doug Clifford supplied songs of their own, and the album’s production reflected that uneasy redistribution of duties. The result is an album that feels, to many listeners and critics, like a patchwork — an honest attempt at fairness that also reveals the band’s fractures. Against that backdrop, “What Are You Gonna Do” reads like a candid note in a family album: simple, human, and a little rueful.
Lyrically the song asks small, pointed questions about responsibility and consequence. It does not aim for mythology; it settles for scenes: decisions and their immediate aftermath, the modest drama of people who know one another’s patterns and have tired of repeating them. For an older audience, those images are often the most affecting — not the grand betrayals, but the slow accumulations of disappointment, the little refrains that tell you everything has shifted. There is honesty here without self-pity: a voice that knows the world hasn’t ended but also knows it won’t return to the way it was. That kind of resignation, when sung plainly, feels like companionship to anyone who’s learned to measure loss by its domestic details.
Part of this song’s resonance comes from hearing the band in one of its last public configurations: a trio making an effort to be democratic and failing, with dignity, at something inevitable. For those who first loved Creedence as youthful anthems of river and road, songs like “What Are You Gonna Do” mark a different phase — quieter, more ordinary, but no less authentic. They invite the listener to sit with the smallness of life’s choices: to consider what we do when a pattern ends, when the person who used to lead the conversation is gone, and what we say when all that remains is the question itself.
If you return to this track now, decades later, it can feel like finding a short, candid letter tucked between the pages of a well-thumbed book: imperfectly phrased, perhaps, but full of the weathered common sense that only time teaches. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “What Are You Gonna Do” is not a monument; it is a domestic epitaph of sorts — a plain song that holds a small truth: sometimes the most honest response to trouble is a question asked without expectation, and the courage to keep walking anyway.
“Doug Clifford’s voice carries the weight of quiet resignation, like a neighbor sharing life’s small burdens over the fence,” said longtime fan and local historian Marjorie Benson.
“This track captures the final chapter of the band — a glimpse into the cracks where giants once stood,” explained music critic Edward Hall. “It’s a modest, masterful farewell, reflecting both hope and the heavy cost of change.”