I’m a big fan of songs with a big chorus. You know, the ones that sound and feel like rallying cries for love or social change or our dreams to come true. The stories those songs tell are important, of course, but it’s their choruses—especially the ones sung by a full choir of voices—that inspire me to sing along. At the top of my lungs.
Singing those big choruses always feels like I’m part of something bigger than myself. My earliest memory of that feeling came in 1969 with “Give Peace a Chance,” when, as a fourteen-year-old, I decided to join John & Yoko in choosing love over war. The next year, Diana Ross’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” made me believe that even a kid like me could conquer my doubts and fears. Those big songs kept coming, each rousing chorus inspiring me: Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” in 1977; “We Are the World,” in 1985. But my all-time favorite big chorus comes in the song “I Wanna Know What Love Is.”
I wasn’t a Foreigner fan back in 1984, when they first belted out that song’s larger-than-life chorus. The group seemed like just another hard-rock-flirting-with-pop-music band, with big hits that were about what everybody else was selling: finding, losing or winning back somebody to love. With song titles like “Waiting For a Girl Like You,” “Hot-Blooded,” and “Urgent,” one might assume “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” was just more of the same for Foreigner. But after one listen, I knew these guys were singing about something more important than a latest crush. Take a listen.
Maybe you could interpret “I Wanna Know” as the search for romantic love, but that’s not what it sounded like to me. Who starts a love song out like this:
“I gotta take a little time
a little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
in case I need it when I'm older
Now this mountain I must climb
feels like a world upon my shoulders…”
Something told me—no, it was more of a feeling—that Foreigner’s lead singer, Lou Gramm, was facing mountains for more than a girlfriend. By the time I heard this anthem I was already well aware that a song’s lyrics can be interpreted more than one way. Like back in 1977, when Debby Boone had a massive hit with “You Light Up My Life.” If you were listening to pop radio back then, when Debby’s version of the song got stuck at number one for ten weeks, the song is permanently lodged in your brain—whether you like it or not. But Debby shocked the world when she revealed that she wasn’t singing to some guy. It was God, she claimed, who lit up her life.
I had troubling believing Debby’s interpretation of her hit song, mostly because it was featured in a romantic-comedy of the same name. After seeing a girl and guy fall in love on the big screen while the song played, I just couldn’t imagine it as a musical prayer.
Thankfully, I didn’t make the same mistake with Foreigner. From the day MTV started, I decided not to watch music videos, preferring to let my imagination interpret new music. So I had no idea how the band chose to dramatize “I Wanna Know What Love Is” and I had no problem believing that Foreigner could be singing these words to Someone Greater:
“I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me…”
Those words from the chorus, which were repeated after more lyrics about heartache and pain, was powerful in itself, but Foreigner did something to make it extraordinary. With each chorus, their song builds in intensity. After Gramm first reaches for the stars, he’s joined in the next chorus by the New Jersey Mass Choir, a Christian gospel group. That’s weird, I thought, when I found out a religious group was backing a rock band. Isn’t that sacrilegious?
Foreigner’s songwriter Mick Jones satisfied my curiosity when I read an interview in which he explained what he had in mind for this song. Knowing he wanted a choir for his chorus, he struck gold with the New Jersey group. “We did a few takes and it was good,” Jones recalled, “but it was still a bit tentative. So [the choir] got round in a circle, held hands and said The Lord’s Prayer and it seemed to inspire them, because after that they did it in one take.”
But Jones wasn’t finished with the group’s powerful chorus. For the song’s finale, he brought in Jennifer Holiday, a powerhouse vocalist who’d become a star in the Broadway musical Dreamgirls. Holiday added an explosive ending, taking the deep meaning of the song to new heights. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of listening to “I Wanna Know What Love Is.”
And I’ll never get tired of hearing new interpretations of sweet and innocent pop songs. It happened again this past spring, when we were all trying to get used to staying at home. One of the things that felt particularly lonesome to me was the thought on not hearing live music. When might I again be lifted up by a chorus of voices? Then a friend sent me this link.
There it was again, that tricky word Love and all the mixed messages we can hear in it. But listening to all those voices singing about it left me with no doubt what kind of love we need right now. Watching those voices united on my computer, I just had to sing along.