The 'Cold War Situation' That Inspired 'I Want to Know What Love Is' by Foreigner'
- edgarstreetbooks
- Feb 13
- 2 min read
100 Greatest 80s Pop Songs' Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
Guitarist Mick Jones wrote Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” a №1 hit in 1985.
“I always worked late at night, when everybody left and the phone stopped ringing,” Jones recalled in Classic Rock.
“‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ came up at three in the morning sometime in 1984. I don’t know where it came from. I consider it a gift that was sent through me. I think there was something bigger than me behind it. I’d say it was probably written entirely by a higher force.
“The song was an expression of my tempestuous private life over the three years before. I’d been through a divorce, and met someone else who I was going to marry. There’d been turmoil in the band through the huge pressure of selling millions of albums, and me and Lou Gramm were entering a cold war situation.”
Gramm was skeptical about Jones’s inclusion of the New Jersey Mass Choir to provide backing vocals. “We were a little worried that releasing a song like that was going to damage our rock reputation,” Gramm told Chile’s Radio Futuro.
“We had another hit ballad before, ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You,’ but we all felt that this was something different and special and it almost went beyond being a rock song.
“With the gospel choir in there, it kind of moved it through rock into — I don’t know — gospel. It just transcended musical modes, and we were wondering if it would enhance or damage our reputation as a rock band.
“As soon as we heard it on the radio and started getting comments from our family and friends, how they never heard a song like that from us, and how much they loved it, and we saw it racing up the charts, we learned it well enough to play to get ready to tour and perform it at a precise time of the set.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Greatest 80s Pop Songs: The Stories Behind Pop Music of the 1980s, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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