In that short time, however, he left us with one song that recast his lifelong struggles into a breathtaking, triumphant epic. “I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” the last single he released just months before his death, encapsulates Whitley’s abilities as an artist, rising above the tragedy surrounding it to find a deeper strength. It might as well be the sound of the search for the will to live.
It starts with just a trickle; glistening pitter-patters of steel-string and a hi-hat that make a clearing for Whitley’s deep, gentle voice. “I’m a friend of thunder/Friend, is it any wonder lightning strikes me?” he asks, twirling each syllable, world-weary but ready to face the dawn. His demons are abstract but ever-present. “I’ve fought with the devil/Got down on his level/But I never gave in, so he gave up on me,” he reassures. Over a minute passes before the full drum beat arrives. From there it just keeps gaining power, pedal steel and backing harmonies whipping up momentum like Chinook winds barrelling across the plains. By the time he reaches the end of the third verse and declares, “I’ll put this cloud behind me/That’s how the man designed me,” the big man might as well be in the room with us.
There’s nothing resembling a chorus, just a series of subtly interlocking verses that swell until the whole thing drifts away into the clouds. Written by Ron Hellard and Sonny Curtis (the latter a former member of Buddy Holly’s band), Whitley immediately resonated with the song’s sense of pain and resilience upon hearing it played for him. Hellard himself didn’t quite know what to make of the song upon first writing it. It was only upon hearing it again later in life after a number of hardships (including the death of his father) that he realized what he was trying to express. “You’re talking to yourself, really,” he said about hearing it on the radio. “It’s a song about a kind of redemption… It’s like yourself coming back 20, 10 years later, patting yourself on the back and saying, ‘It’s gonna be okay.’”
The song went to No. 1 on the country charts, and it remains transcendent in Whitley’s body of work. While he had plenty of other great hits (the soft sunset glow of “Miami, My Amy,” the creeping synth boogie of “Some Old Side Road,” the deliciously schmaltzy MOR romance of “When You Say Nothing at All”), on “I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” he cut through the cheese and captured a glimpse at the elemental. Like his neotraditional contemporaries, Whitley’s sound exists in a nostalgic nexus between times, his old school arrangements imbued with a lush studio sheen that felt distinctly modern, laying the groundwork for the oncoming pop-country surge of the ’90s. The album it came from, Don’t Close Your Eyes, may have represented Whitley’s move away from the glossier production of his debut toward an earthier feel, but it still exists in a very different world than the honky tonk he grew up idolizing. Like flipping through old Polaroids, there’s a sense of remove in the nostalgic tenor of the ’80s neotraditionalists that gives their soft production a texture all its own.
