The 1980s File Feature
I Made It Through The Rain
Barry Manilow and "I Made It Through the Rain" (1980)By 1980, Barry Manilow had established himself as one of the most commercially successful adult-contempo…
01 The Story
Barry Manilow and "I Made It Through the Rain" (1980)
By 1980, Barry Manilow had established himself as one of the most commercially successful adult-contemporary artists of the preceding decade. His run of hit singles from 1974 onward, including "Mandy," "Could It Be Magic," "I Write the Songs," "Looks Like We Made It," "Can't Smile Without You," and "Copacabana (At the Copa)," had made him a dominant force on the Billboard charts and a consistent presence in the upper reaches of the Hot 100. He had achieved five number-one singles and generated album sales in the tens of millions, cementing his status as one of the defining pop vocalists of the 1970s.
"I Made It Through the Rain" was released in November 1980 as a single from the album Barry, which was issued on Arista Records. The song was written by Gerard Kenny, along with Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman. Gerard Kenny, a New York-born singer-songwriter who had carved out a parallel career in the United Kingdom, composed the piece as a broadly applicable statement of perseverance and survival, designed to resonate with listeners who had navigated difficult personal circumstances. Kenny himself had recorded a version of the song, but it was Manilow's interpretation and the promotional apparatus of Arista Records that brought it to mass commercial attention in the American market.
The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 on November 22, 1980, debuting at number 61. Its rise was steady and sustained, reflecting the kind of format-driven airplay momentum that characterized the best-performing adult-contemporary releases of the period. Over sixteen weeks on the chart, it climbed consistently, reaching its peak position of number 10 on January 31, 1981, giving it the distinction of being a significant cross-year hit that began in the final months of 1980 and reached its commercial apex in early 1981.
On the adult-contemporary chart, where Manilow had consistently dominated throughout the 1970s, the song's performance was particularly strong. The production, handled with the smooth, orchestrated professionalism that typified Manilow's Arista recordings, provided an appropriate sonic backdrop for the lyric's themes of resilience and communal support. The arrangement balanced warm strings, carefully voiced piano, and a rhythm section that complemented Manilow's vocal delivery without overpowering the emotional intimacy of the lyric.
The commercial context of late 1980 was shaped in part by significant cultural events: the November 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the assassination of John Lennon on December 8 of that year, and the broader sense of social transition that characterized the period. A song about survival and perseverance arriving during this specific cultural moment found audiences that were, for varied reasons, receptive to its themes of holding on through difficulty and emerging on the other side. The timing gave the record an additional layer of cultural resonance beyond its purely musical attributes.
The Barry album from which the single was drawn was also commercially successful, adding to the long string of platinum and gold certifications that characterized Manilow's Arista output. Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records and one of the most influential figures in the recording industry, had signed Manilow in the early 1970s and presided over his commercial ascent with careful attention to single selection and promotional strategy. The choice to release "I Made It Through the Rain" as a single reflected a deliberate decision to provide Manilow's audience with a song whose message extended beyond romantic themes into the broader territory of personal perseverance, expanding the emotional range of the music while remaining within the adult-contemporary format's comfort zone.
The song became one of Manilow's signature recordings and was performed regularly in his live concert work throughout subsequent decades, suggesting that it resonated with audiences in ways that gave it lasting significance beyond its original chart performance. Concert recordings from the 1980s and beyond document the audience response the song generated: the recognition that comes from a piece of music that has attached itself to personal experience over time. Its top-ten showing on the Hot 100 added to a discography that already represented one of the most commercially consistent runs in adult-contemporary music history, and the song's durability in the live repertoire confirmed that its appeal extended well beyond a single commercial moment.
02 Song Meaning
Perseverance, Community, and the Survival of Difficulty
"I Made It Through the Rain" is among the most explicitly thematized songs in Barry Manilow's repertoire. Where many of his most famous recordings explored romantic relationships and their emotional landscapes, this song addresses a different but equally fundamental human experience: the act of enduring hardship and arriving at the other side of it intact. The rain of the title functions as a well-established metaphor for adversity, difficulty, and the periods of life in which circumstances seem persistently adverse.
The song's key emotional and thematic move is the shift from individual to collective experience. The speaker has not survived difficulty alone but alongside others who were similarly enduring their own trials. This communal dimension is central to the song's meaning and distinguishes it from a simpler narrative of personal resilience. The recognition that others have shared the experience of difficulty, and that solidarity can be found even in periods of hardship, transforms the lyric from a private statement into something closer to an anthem.
Written by Gerard Kenny alongside Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman, the lyric operates in deliberately broad strokes. The imagery of rain, shelter, and survival is accessible to virtually any listener regardless of the specific nature of their difficulties. This universality is a feature rather than a limitation: a song about generic resilience is available to be claimed by anyone who has navigated hardship of any kind. The listener does not need to have experienced the specific circumstances described because the metaphorical framework is broad enough to accommodate nearly any form of adversity, from personal loss to professional failure to broader social upheaval.
Barry Manilow's vocal performance is particularly well matched to the song's meaning. His voice carries an emotional directness that conveys genuine feeling without tipping into sentimentality, and his commitment to the lyric's themes gives the performance an authenticity that listeners responded to strongly. The adult-contemporary audience that Manilow had cultivated throughout the 1970s was composed largely of listeners for whom themes of perseverance and the navigation of life's difficulties carried direct personal relevance. He was singing to people who understood hardship from experience.
The song also carries an implicit message about time: that periods of difficulty are finite, that the rain does eventually stop. This temporal reassurance, the promise embedded in the past tense of the title, that one has already made it through, is perhaps the most psychologically meaningful element of the lyric. The speaker is not in the middle of the difficulty but reflecting on it from the other side. This retrospective vantage point gives the song a note of earned hopefulness rather than false optimism, which is part of what allows it to function as a genuine source of comfort rather than mere reassurance. The distinction between earned hope and empty cheerfulness is what separates truly sustaining music from superficially upbeat work.
The song remains a defining example of the inspirational adult-contemporary form that Manilow helped to develop during the 1970s and early 1980s. Its combination of accessible metaphor, broad emotional universality, and strong melodic identity made it effective as both a commercial and an emotionally resonant piece of popular songwriting. Its durability in Manilow's live repertoire across four decades is the clearest evidence of its lasting hold on the audiences who first encountered it during its 1980-1981 chart run.
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