Volume 5, Entry 12: Power Ballad

Big-hearted rockin’ across the Causeway

Back in August, Maia invited me to her white coat ceremony.

For as long as I’ve known Maia, she’s wanted to be a veterinarian, and this event celebrated the official start of four years at the best vet school in the country. Those years will be grueling, but this ceremony would be anything but. An adorable dog wandered around the stage throughout. It was a delight.

Scooping up unused tickets from her new peers granted me a seat, and I arranged coverage at school so I could attend. Typically, any deviation from my regular schedule rattles me, but this was the rare departure that provoked minimal anxiety. The reason: our country’s top college of veterinary medicine happens to be UC Davis, my alma mater.

Eleven quarters of daily commutes to UC Davis make that trip a breeze. It’s so automatic that sometimes I start heading there when I intend to take Broadway or visit downtown. For three and a half years, I drove that stretch five days each week in both directions.

To pass the time on those mostly solo drives, I played music. I used an actual iPod for most of that era, a sleek but dense rounded rectangle of songs cobbled together from assorted peer-to-peer sites. iTunes blessed me with the ability to build playlists, and I almost exclusively played from one such list for my entire commuting run.

On my way to Maia’s ceremony, I listened to Taylor Swift, but traffic elongated the drive back. Crawling down I-80 while still miles from the Causeway, I decided to throw back to the era when I drove that stretch daily by listening to that UC Davis playlist.

No tracklist is necessary to describe the contents of that playlist. The reason: every song was a big-hearted love song. Okay, fine, there were exceptions—I had an odd fascination with Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape”, for example—but 90% of my drives were accompanied by romantic ballads.

2008 was an increasingly long time ago, so I hadn't regularly listened to many of these songs in a decade. Still, in the glow of attending Maia’s biggest event, I felt energized, and both the notes and lyrics found me quickly.

Chicago’s wholesome “You’re the Inspiration”, my one-time favorite song, led things off. After chasing that with “Can’t Fight This Feeling”, another mainstay, I knew the next song before its first notes wailed. An original addition to the playlist and a car trip classic, I hadn’t listened to it even once in fifteen years. That song?

“I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner.

Opening the band’s 1984 album, Agent Provocateur, “I Want to Know What Love Is” became an instant hit that has endured in popular media since its initial release two years before my birth.

If you’ve never heard the song before, the piece carries dramatic intensity and an ethereal air; that odd combo lends power and an almost spiritual quality. The songwriter, Mick Jones, agrees:

I consider it a gift that was sent through me. I think there was something bigger than me behind it. I'd say it was probably written entirely by a higher force.¹

More than any other song, that power ballad voiced my mindset from 2004 through 2008. Listening to Foreigner’s Lou Gramm belt the thing out made me feel things. He sang what my heart yearned for.

Unsurprisingly, an intervening fifteen years made for an interesting listening experience. Belting it out as my wheels rolled past Mace Blvd ignited a time machine—I still knew every word and every impossible-to-hit note—but the song sounded different to my ear. At first, I was ready to blame nostalgia for imbuing the music with additional weight, but then I sang the second chorus:

In my life, there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me (hey)

While singing along from 2004 to 2008, I assumed the heartache I channeled would be temporary. Sure, I was driving solo then, but I would one day render Foreigner’s longing obsolete. Imagining all the love ahead of me, I looked forward to the day when I would hear that song and recognize a relic. I sang about wanting to know love while anticipating a future in which I actually would.

But in August 2023, over fifteen years removed from attending UC Davis, I played that song again. While I did, I was stuck in traffic on 80, unmarried and in no relationship, driving a car and singing a ballad. All by myself. I still didn’t know what love was. Foreigner’s words still sounded like my own.

It didn’t matter that I’ve changed. It didn’t matter that I want different things now. The song hit differently, I reasoned, because time had imbued it with something new:

Déjà vu.

*****

If there’s any mystery to a 2004 college kid racing along the freeway to a 1984 chart-topper, I can summarily dismiss that intrigue. The song appealed to me in my twenties because of its broadness. It says so little that any lovesick puppy can sniff himself out between the chord progressions.

I've 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

The song sets an opening scene of rumination: the singer isn’t sure what to do or say in his present state. He recognizes absence in his life, a potential “need” that threatens to last into his future, but he lacks certainty over potential evidence of affection as well as the ramifications of acting on it.

This mountain, I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds, I see love shine
Keeps me warm as life grows colder

He feels the weight of life, especially while shouldering his burden alone. The flickers of connection he ponders promise to restore heat to his frigid, lonely heart. Combined with the ethereal—for a power ballad—instrumentation behind the vocals, the song elevates this pivotal moment as one with a grand scale. The song, so earnest in its epic certainty, renders the very contemplation of love the stuff of legend.

There’s zero detail, though. The words Gramm sings tell no story and convey no character or setting; Foreigner’s single is no “Livin’ on a Prayer”, where Bon Jovi’s first sung word is a fictional dock worker’s name en route to a specific story of two rugged lovers. “I Want to Know What Love Is” might well take place in a vacuum. For all one can tell, it’s all inside the singer’s head.

This structure was catnip for the college kid who played it at least twice daily. Love as I knew it existed exclusively in my head. It was the thing that daydreams were made of, the destination my wandering thoughts wandered toward. I didn’t know what love was, but I imagined it sounded like Foreigner fronting a glorious gospel choir.

Why love preoccupied me didn’t make sense at the time, but it does now. As a teenager with body image issues and self-esteem low enough to sneak under a Chad Bradford submarine slider, I sought external validation to paper over the holes inside me. Even though I knew what I wanted to do in the future, I couldn’t escape the fear that I would get there and feel precisely as alone as I did while commuting daily.

Those long drives amplified that sense of isolation and left me wholly aware of the emptiness in my life. I filled that judgmental silence with music, and my playlist pointed toward romance as the solution to what ailed me. Like Foreigner, I knew “heartache and pain”, so their song, along with so many others, primed me to pine for someone to sing to.

And so I sang alone. The amorphous space that sets their song became my compact car. The target of their lyrics became whichever woman I was into at the time. Every sing-along happened on the highway, but in my mind, I was elsewhere, summoning a guttural plea from the very top of my vocal register as I stretched out my hand to the mystery woman who would one day center my life and purpose. Oh, the stories I imagined for those women and me. Nicholas Sparks had nothing on the sparks I induced intellectually while Foreigner serenaded digitally. I liked other songs more, but no song carried my vision better.

Sweet though that vision was, examining the song today, I can’t help but interpret it differently. I listened then to a sweeping declaration of affection, but wizened ears can’t hear the same tune. No longer does it conjure the same scenes of beautiful bliss.

In particular, I recognize the song’s overwhelming myopia. “I Want to Know What Love Is” still radiates the earnestness that drew me in, but beneath that try-hard hustle toward togetherness, the song centers wholly on one person and one person only: the singer.

I've 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

There’s nothing in this first verse about the person being sung to. The singer ponders his next step, meaning we aren’t talking instant chemistry or undeniable magnetism. This is plotting. He’s even filtering his decision to initiate through a utilitarian lens: the anticipated needs of an older iteration of himself influence his design. I no longer imagine two people stepping toward one another; this is one long-haired 80s rocker moving toward a stationary target.

This mountain, I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds, I see love shine
Keeps me warm as life grows colder

The nourishing relationship I fantasized about isn’t here either. I can excuse the metaphor; I still read that as a fear of broaching the subject and opening oneself up to the possibly more profound heartache of rejection. But the love that cuts through the cloud cover promises only to keep the singer warm. The pronoun in that fourth line is first-person singular, not plural, even though “us” (or even a second-person “you”) would fit smoothly into the meter.

Speaking of pronouns:

In my life, there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
To change this lonely life

Notice that this first segment of the chorus also maintains a strictly first-person perspective. It’s all about the imposing melancholy he faces; the singer fears the return of his loneliness. That fear—and inertia, since he’s come too far to hold back—inspires him to speak up. And what does he finally say to the woman? What comprises the contents of his appeal for her heart?

I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me

Someone call Argos because that’s a lot of I’s. There’s a brutal translation I can’t help but notice now. Show me love. Teach me love. I feel alone, so make me feel less alone. Three variations on “I want” followed by an “I know” reads as more manipulative than Jones and Gramm sound when they sing it, but there’s no denying that their power ballad makes for a decidedly less romantic overture than I heard twenty years ago.

Indeed, reading the song through this critical lens recontextualizes it. In a word, I feel a little icky for singing such a selfish song with such passion for so many years. I would love to extricate myself from the selfish desire it broadcasts, but if I’m honest, this new reading actually makes the piece a more fitting anthem for my time in college.

What Foreigner sings so resonantly toward represents precisely what I sought in the 2000s. I wanted someone to make me feel better about myself. I craved companionship to end my loneliness, and I sought the security of someone else’s affection to salve the self-loathing already storming me in full force. I said all the right things about serving, providing, and reciprocating, but there’s no clearer vision of what I wanted than “I Want to Know What Love Is” when I reflect on it.

Indeed, this immature perspective partly reflects the heart of the song. I didn’t know what love was because I had limited experience, so I could never envision a richer rendition. Music and media defined the experience for me; I relied on bands like Foreigner to show me. Alas, not every hit held winning wisdom.

Although I might shake my head a bit, I don’t cringe over how full-heartedly I loved “I Want to Know What Love Is” back then. I didn’t know any better. If anything, this new reading leaves me marveling at how far off I was.

Foreigner didn’t show me what love is. If anything, they probably doubled down on my misconceptions and reinforced my selfish purview.

Not that lonely-and-loveless I could tell the difference.

*****

After dissecting the song in the previous section, I could easily claim that the difference I perceived while listening to “I Want to Know What Love Is” in August drew out of a similar space. Had I, while driving down I-80 on a Friday, suddenly understood the shallow emotion of the song, well, I’d be a better person than I am now. That didn’t happen. I came up with that yesterday, on March 17, 2024.

The Foreigner song sounded different, but I ignored that discrepancy. I reveled in singing the thing! The track activated a time machine for me. My brain remembered the words like I’d been yelling them yesterday. Defunct feelings felt as visceral at 37 as they had at 21.

That last bit was what stayed with me. Old feelings are sticky; no matter what or how I change, they remain impervious to eradication. They’re like tunes that get stuck in my head, playing and playing on endless loops until replaced by an alternate track.

The title of Foreigner’s song formalizes the pinnacle line of their greatest hit. “I wanna know what love is” pays off the musical tension built by both the contemplative verses and the first section of the chorus; it erupts from Lou Gramm’s throat like a volcano, and for years, it’s taken my heart with it. I feel every word as fully as I did in 2004 every afternoon crossing the Causeway. I don’t want to feel the desperate longing that found Mick Jones in the middle of some mid-eighties night, but in August ‘23 traffic, with the intensity of a twenty-two-year-old, I once again did.

I’ve been hearing that damned tune in the back of my mind ever since.

A funny thing happened last Friday, though. I had opened the latest issue of The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s recovery newsletter—highly recommended; I’m a big fan and paid subscriber—when I stumbled across a poem by George Bilgere.

The post in question centered on the death of an important friend of Daulerio’s, and he invoked the poem to capture the difficulty he had in corresponding with that friend during the later stages of his illness. The seventh, eighth, and ninth lines of Bilgere’s poem “Letter to the Dying” stood out. The money quote:

I can’t even say
I love you, because I would never say that
unless he were dying

After I finished those lines, I stopped reading. My carpal tunnel returned last week, so I take regular breaks while using my phone, but this pause was for pondering the problem posed in the poem.

Moments into my pause, I had solved the problem. Bilgere and Daulerio might as well have asked me the derivative of inverse tangent—I already resolved this dilemma years ago.

Because I never know what another person is thinking, feeling, or going through, I aim to treat them as though they are, like me, never too far from breaking down. A master at masking misery myself, I assume others might have developed similar skills. I, therefore, try to show them kindness, rally behind them, and model the sort of behavior capable of inducing optimism about an often wretched world.

Part of my resolution has been saying “I love you” with regularity. Saying those words in that order takes far less vocal effort than singing a power ballad, but there’s unique terror in uttering those three syllables. Saying them relinquishes power; it broadcasts to another person that their fingers squeeze your heart. That trio of words invites heartache and pain. What if you say it and the other person doesn’t say it back??!

I know all this, but I say “I love you” all the time. Every instance comes authentically, too. It broadcasts the truth I already understand: if you were gone, I would suffer for that absence.

Invoking “I love you” with the frequency I do ties back to an understanding of how flexible the verb “love” actually is. Growing up, “I love you” was the exclusive domain of the family, a phrase I spoke only before bed and partings. I used it with my parents, my brother, Uncle Tom, Aunt Anita, and Dwight, but that I also echoed it with relatives I hardly knew lent it malleability.

Likewise, when I summoned the phrase during high school—always during some dramatic declaration; I was a lot—I tapped into additional versatility. This was a desirous, forward-looking “love” that leaned toward romance. These were similar colors, sure, but different hues entirely.

As they were when I taught AVID, and the word gained a new dimension of protectiveness. Whenever I said it, I invoked it instead of more complex ideas like “I feel custody for your well-being” and “Your future struggles will influence my happiness”. I meant it with conviction equal to what I said to my family; in some ways, I always heard my mom’s voice when I said it.

And then, finally, I let it flow freely. When I granted those 35 AVID students access to my heart, I could no longer deny how many others had claims to it. The “I love you” they heard acknowledged my tether to them, too. Ditto for my friends: how could I not say it to them when I felt so willing to give to them from the deepest recesses of myself, when I felt such security in their presence? Even during Challenge Days and Diamond Days, I could flash ASL’s visual version to convey my willingness to stand in for those in the recipient’s life who couldn’t or wouldn’t enunciate it. The number of people I have said—that I say!—“I love you” to is staggering to comprehend. Staggering.

It still feels awkward to say it. Every time I do, I know there will be people it strikes as anachronistic and ill-fitting. They, like me for so, so long, listen to musicians let “love” loose and think of only the strictest definition of a word I find to be unbelievably fluid and encompassing. It’s a beautiful word I know far better now than before.

[[ The verb! ]]

Still holding my phone, I thought back to August. I thought back to Maia’s white coat ceremony and driving home down I-80 to the soundtrack from an earlier stage of my life. Still searching for understanding, I pulled up Foreigner’s song on my phone. It’s the only song of theirs I own. I played that song.

Instead of hearing echoes of old emotions or critical reinterpretations of the words, I thought about that white coat ceremony and what it meant to have a ticket to celebrate Maia that day. From there, I thought about Maia and the countless events and moments across nearly ten years of knowing her.

Then I thought about the people who’ve centered my life during the same era as Maia has. I thought about all of these people that I care about, all of these people I cherish, all these people I say “I love you” to without blinking.

But I also thought about those who say it back. Matt, waving from the sidewalk. Jacqui, ending a text. R’lyeh, mid-hug after a meaningful talk. Julia, following a walk.

When the chorus finally hit, I broke down. For the first time, I wasn’t singing along with Foreigner—not because of vocal limitations but because I couldn’t through the tears. “I Want to Know What Love Is” sounded alien to me, laughably, impossibly different, but that was because it was playing from an iPhone speaker in my living room and barely audible through my happy sobs.

By the third verse, I had regained my composure and joined in on the chorus. Foreigner’s words boomed from my chest, but they didn’t speak for me anymore.

Against all odds, I already know what love is. It’s nothing like I anticipated in 2004 when I wore out romantic power ballads, but that fact diminishes nothing. To quote the song one last time: “It looks like love has finally found me.”

As the last lyrics landed, one final ounce of understanding dawned on me: why the song felt different back in August.

After photos and chit-chat outside the Mondavi center, I parted from the Gerdin group to head home. As I do whenever I say goodbye to her, I hugged Maia and said, “I love you”.

As I turned toward the Mondavi Center parking lot, ready to leave UC Davis on yet another lonely drive, Maia spoke to me. She said four words.

“I love you too.”

---

Something I cherish about writing these extended pieces is the way they transform parts of my life. Before writing this piece, I thought of “I Want to Know What Love Is” as a gushy love song I blasted during college. After writing this piece, I will never hear that song without thinking about the people who have taught me the answer to Foreigner’s plea. The same thing happened with “right where you left me” while writing about Katelyn last April.

Writing this newsletter forces me to think about things differently; I change for that thinking. Thank you for continuing to read so I can continue to reflect, compose, revise, and grow.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_to_Know_What_Love_Is?wprov=sfti1#