I Want to Know What Love Is
by Foreigner
- 81
- BPM
- F# major
- Key
- 2B
- Camelot
- 48
- Danceability
- 20
- Acousticness
Foreigner released "I Want to Know What Love Is" in November 1984 as the lead single from their fifth album, Agent Provocateur. The credit goes to Mick Jones. Lou Gramm says he contributed and should share it, somewhere between 5 percent according to Jones and 35 percent according to Gramm. Then-bassist Rick Wills says Jones wrote it alone. Jones and Alex Sadkin produced it, with backing vocals from the New Jersey Mass Choir, Dreamgirls star Jennifer Holliday, and keyboard work by Tom Bailey of the Thompson Twins.
Gramm said Jones was reluctant to let him hear the first rough version. In Gramm's view the song held things in Jones's life that he had not resolved.
It reached number one on the UK Singles Chart on January 15, 1985, displacing Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and stayed three weeks. On February 2, 1985, it knocked Madonna's "Like a Virgin" out of number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was the band's first and only pop chart-topper in either country. It spent five weeks at number one in Australia. The B-side was "Street Thunder (Marathon Theme)," an instrumental from the album made for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
I Want to Know What Love Is runs at 81 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.96 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 741 ms. It is in F# major, Camelot 2B, which shares its notes with Eb minor and mixes cleanly with B major and Db major.
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