Urgent

"Urgent" entered the U.S. pop charts in the week ending July 4, 1981, and climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, a position it held throughout September. It also spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Rock Tracks chart and reached No. 1 in Canada. The single came from the album 4, which went gold and platinum during the song's chart run.

The song began with a riff guitarist Mick Jones had taped as an experimental instrumental idea. Producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange insisted on hearing every idea Jones had recorded, no matter how embarrassing, and seized on the riff, telling him it had potential even though no song existed around it. Jones later described the result as a hybrid, a quirky combination of rock and soul, and noted it was a departure from the band's previous album, Head Games. He played both lead and rhythm guitar on the recording, including a line originally written for Ian McDonald, who had left Foreigner in 1980.

Junior Walker, the Motown multi-instrumentalist, happened to be performing in New York during the album sessions and agreed to play the tenor saxophone solo. Lange appreciated the raw edges of Walker's first take and used it, though Jones remembered the producer splicing together multiple takes instead. Saxophonist Mark Rivera recorded at least 12 versions of a solo himself, yet the first version ended up on the release. Thomas Dolby programmed synthesizers, and a demo of his song "Urges" inspired the lyric "Urgent, urgent."