Foreigner – I Want To Know What Love Is

Mick Jones wrote Foreigner’s only transatlantic No.1 alone at three in the morning, and always said something larger than him put it there.

Mick Jones worked in the dead hours, after everyone had gone home and the phones had stopped. Sometime in 1984, alone at three in the morning, he found the melody and the plea that became “I Want to Know What Love Is.” He has never claimed much credit for it. He has called it a gift sent through him, something written by a force bigger than himself, and he has said it so consistently across four decades that it reads less like modesty than genuine bewilderment at what arrived that night.

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Released on November 21, 1984 as the lead single from Foreigner’s fifth album, Agent Provocateur, the song did what nothing else in the band’s catalog managed. It hit No.1 on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart, knocking Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” off the top in America and displacing Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in Britain. It topped the charts in six other countries too. For a band that had spent years as reliable hitmakers without ever quite reaching the summit, it was the breakthrough — and it remains their only transatlantic No.1.

The authorship of it has never been fully settled. Jones is the sole credited writer, but Lou Gramm, the voice that carried the record, has long said he shaped the song and deserves a share of the credit, putting his own contribution somewhere near a third while Jones estimated it closer to five percent. Bassist Rick Wills sided with Jones. Gramm also worried at the time that a ballad this big would drag Foreigner out of rock and into adult contemporary, softening the band he had helped build. The tension over that question would sharpen through the sessions and eventually help pull the classic lineup apart.

A gospel choir, a circle, and The Lord’s Prayer

What lifted the song from strong to overwhelming happened in the studio. Recorded at The Hit Factory and Right Track in New York, the track went through a difficult birth: producer Trevor Horn started the album, spent months on backing tracks, then left to work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Alex Sadkin stepped in to finish it alongside Jones. The turning point came when the New Jersey Mass Choir, affiliated with the Gospel Music Workshop of America, arrived to sing. Their early takes were careful. So the singers gathered in a circle, joined hands, and said The Lord’s Prayer together before the next pass. That take was the one. Jones realized he had written something close to a hymn — a spiritual, he called it — dressed as a pop single. Dreamgirls star Jennifer Holliday, recording nearby, added backing vocals, and the thirty-voice choir was moved enough to cut its own version the following year. The single sat on Agent Provocateur, which topped the UK album chart, reached No.4 in the US, and went triple platinum in America.

The song never really left. Tina Arena recorded it in 1998 with Jones producing and adding a new bridge for her; Wynonna Judd cut it in 2004 with Jeff Beck on guitar; Mariah Carey’s 2009 version became a hit in Brazil. It landed at No.479 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and has stayed a fixture of classic-rock and adult-contemporary radio, still charting on Billboard’s adult contemporary recurrents chart nearly two decades after its release. Few power ballads have proven as durable, and fewer still began as one exhausted man’s private question in an empty room.

Fifty years on, the voices return

In 2025, for the band’s 50th anniversary, Foreigner staged a concert on a closed set at Ellis Island and Brooklyn’s DUMBO House, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, as a genuine storm rolled across New York Harbor and nearly stopped the shoot. That performance became the concert film Foreigner 50: In the Eye of the Storm, headed to theaters worldwide in the fall of 2026, and its soundtrack album arrived on July 24, 2026. The live version of “I Want to Know What Love Is” below brings together current frontman Kelly Hansen with two original members: founding keyboardist Al Greenwood, and Lou Gramm, the voice on the 1984 record, back to guest on the song he helped make enormous. Founding guitarist Mick Jones, who revealed a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2024, has been absent from the stage since 2022, but his song stands at the center of the celebration — the same plea, sung by the voices that built it, four decades later.

The performance you’re watching in this second video is that 2025 Ellis Island staging, not the 1984 promo film — a different night, a different lineup configuration, the same song.