Back in the before-times when Lindsay was recovering from her shattered ankle, I used to play her the Chicago song “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”…well, every day, during her long road to recovering from surgery and walking again. I’d hear the song a hundred times growing up, but only then did I notice something I’d missed as a kid…and now I can’t hear the song without noticing it.

The drumming at the end of the song is terrible.

I’ll jump right to where it gets bad, at the 2:40 mark where the song shifts into the fast-paced chug:

It’s a mess. Clumsy fills, flubbed strokes, missed timing. Part of me cringes every time I hear it now.

And it’s not like Danny Seraphine (pretty sure he was the drummer in Chicago back then) didn’t know what he was doing — he was an accomplished drummer. Like, here you can see him play the same song perfectly well:

Also, please note in that live version the snare drum does NOT sound like someone has wrapped it in a duvet for the song’s first half. Like, Russ Kunkel thinks that snare drum sounds too muted. (Sorry, drummer joke.)

I don’t get it. It’s like someone heard a version with no Peter Cetera mess-ups, but the worst possible drum track, and just said…yup, sounds good, press it. Like, how could this became the primary artefact of the song? It even kept surviving the multiple remasters that were released over the years. What, someone couldn’t have gotten back in there and touched some shit up?