1979Released
4:38

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about After the Love Has Gone. By Songfacts®.

This song is about a relationship that has gone bad. The singer struggles to understand how something that felt so right could suddenly be so wrong, and wonders if their love is lost forever.

This was written by David Foster, Jay Graydon and Bill Champlin. In a Songfacts interview with Jay Graydon he told the story: "David Foster produced an album for Jaye P. Morgan in 1976. It's a great record. It's available in Japan, and never did anything here, really. Then he was at Motown playing some songs with Jaye to try to get a deal over there. He was in the middle of playing a song and he forgot the chorus, and he ad-libbed the chorus to 'After The Love Has Gone.' He comes over to my house, and we went into my little dinky studio. He sits down at the piano, and he says, 'Listen to this chorus.' He plays it, and I said, 'Hey, here's an idea for a verse.' And I went, 'da da dom, A major 7, da-D-minor-6, da da A major 7, bom ba da da da F-sharp minor.' And he just immediately continued on with that, and we had the whole song written in about half an hour/45 minutes. We called Champlin: 'Bill, get over here, we need a lyric.' David was producing Champlin at the time. David recorded it with Champlin, maybe three different versions. He got one that he really liked, though. But then David was also writing with Maurice White for Earth, Wind & Fire for the I Am album. He played the song for Maurice, and Maurice loved it. David called me and says, 'Hey, man, Earth, Wind & Fire wants to record it, but I don't want to tell Champlin that it's gonna have to get pulled off his record. Will you do it?' I said, 'I sure will.' (laughs) I called Bill and I said, 'Bill, here's the story.' And he says, 'I'm not an idiot, man.' (laughing) I said, 'I'm glad you say you're not an idiot. Because they say this thing's gonna be a single for sure. And this could be big.' Needless to say, that song still generates good money. It's unbelievable."

David Foster came up with the title, which provided a storyline that Bill Champlin filled in with the lyric, writing backward to figure what led to the love drain. Champlin didn't write it from personal experience, but imagined a scenario, which is typical of his work. "If we had to go through every change that we write about, we'd all be completely nuts," he said in a Songfacts interview.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of After the Love Has Gone.
F♯Key
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
132BPM

Album

The album After the Love Has Gone is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released After the Love Has Gone.
Columbia/Legacy
(P) 1979 Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

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