Foreigner’s Lou Gramm sat down with Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum and during a part of the chat, he talked about the one Foreigner song he didn’t want to be a part of.
“There’s a couple of songs that Mick wrote,” the singer said when asked if there were any songs he didn’t want to sing. “They don’t come to mind right now which ones they are but I had a difficult time singing them because they were either too sing-songy or… But you know, he’s a great songwriter.”
“It was just so basic that it was something I didn’t feel,” he continued. “It was beneath me but it just seemed too simplistic. How could you go from ‘Juke Box Hero’ and ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ into something that basically sounded like some of the McCartney songs that are almost babyish [like ‘Uncle Albert’]? That kind of thing and I’m looking at Mick like, ‘You want me to sing that?’”
The rocker then started singing the song to prove his point: “I’ll give you the example. [Singing] ‘I don’t want to live without you, I don’t want to live without you, I don’t want to live without you, live without your love,’ and I had the toughest time singing that because I didn’t write any part of it.”
This isn’t the first time Gramm shared his dislike about the song. In different interviews, he has been public about not liking the song many times. While he appreciates the song’s success, he sometimes wishes ‘Juke Box Hero’ had been their biggest hit. He said the ballad ‘pigeon-holed us into something’ the band never really wanted to be.
“I heard there’s going to be a segment of the induction where people like Pete Frampton and a number of other people will say why they think we should have been in, and how glad they are that we are,” the rocker said of the song while talking about their induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “That’ll leave us with about six minutes left, so I heard we’re going to play one song.”
Rick Wills also added in another interview that the song was Mick Jones’ song and he ‘had the whole thing in his head.’ “To be perfectly honest, at the time Lou was getting a little bit — he was sort of saying, ‘There’s too many ballads, Mick. It’s too soft. It’s all keyboard-orientated. I want more guitar stuff. I want it to be guitar-based and more rocky.’ And Mick was just going down that road at the time.”
“He wrote so much stuff on guitar that once he discovered what he could do on a keyboard, and you’ll notice, if you know the music, it’s mostly in sharps and flats, because he writes everything on the black notes on a keyboard… But that’s just the way he writes, and that’s the way he does it,” he added.
Foreigner has a show tonight in Duluth, Minnesota. Their current tour wraps up on November 9 in Las Vegas, Nevada.