Anyone who’s ever come up with a half-decent tune knows that songwriting is a craft which tends not to conform to office hours. Indeed, some writers deliberately shun the nine to five, finding that inspiration can strike at any time of the day or night – and that was certainly the case for Foreigner guitarist and co-founder Mick Jones, who first got the idea for his band’s signature power ballad, I Want To Know What Love Is, in the early hours of the morning.
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The writing: “I consider it a gift that was sent through me”
“I always worked late at night, when everybody left and the phone stopped ringing,” Jones later told Classic Rock magazine. “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’d say it was probably written entirely by a higher power.”
The initial idea came to Jones while he sat the keyboard in the studio at his London apartment. Its arrival was timely, too, for Jones’ personal and professional life was especially turbulent at this point: he had recently been through a divorce, while Foreigner’s inter-band relations were also at a relatively low ebb.
“There’d been turmoil in the band through the huge pressure of selling millions of albums,” Jones explained to Classic Rock. “Me and Lou [Gramm, Foreigner singer] were entering a Cold War situation. I’d just come back to England from New York and was happy to be in touch with my roots. So it was an emotional time that stirred up a lot of things.”
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However, Jones was blessed with inspiration aplenty during those fateful early hours. Coming up with the title I Want To Know What Love Is, as well as the opening chords and chorus, he completed a good part of the song during that initial nocturnal session – and he believed he’d worked up something of substance.
“Afterwards I spent a couple of days piecing it together,” he told M Magazine in 2014. “I wanted to recreate the feeling in the song from a lyrical standpoint. Its formula is intro, verse, verse again, pre-chorus, chorus – the old, hackneyed pattern – but somehow, something lifts it out of being cheesy. You think to yourself, How many times have these chords been used? But there is something about the pattern I used them in that makes it unique.”
