Waiting for a Girl like You

Foreigner has always stayed away from any "message songs," so you won't get political or social commentary from them, but you will get songs dealing with relationships and emotions. Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones, who wrote the song with lead singer Lou Gramm, told us, "There's a song called 'Waiting For A Girl Like You,' which I literally had no control over, it just came out. I had no idea what it meant, but it got to the point where I couldn't even be in the studio when we were recording it sometimes, it left such a deep impression on me. But it ended up being a song that brought a lot of people together. I hear these days that it's a song that a lot of people play at their weddings. It's the kind of song that the pen does the writing, and you don't even know where it came from. But I feel that it's stuff that's floating around at times and you have to grasp it - it's kind of flying around in the air, and you just have to be open enough to let that flow through you. Sometimes it's sort of mystical where these ideas come from. Sometimes you have an idea about a song, or you have a title that you base the rest of the song on, but sometimes it comes just literally from an unknown area. You'll be thinking about something completely different, and suddenly you get that inspiration. I usually know when it's happening, and I just let it flow and try not to interfere with it - just try and deliver what that thought, those feelings, mean." (Check out our interview with Mick Jones.)

Thomas Dolby of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame played the synthesizer intro, which was very un-Foreigner, but helped make the song a huge hit. The 4 album was produced by Mutt Lange, who called in the 19-year-old Dolby after hearing his demo tape. In our interview with Thomas Dolby, he said: "It was great to work with a top band and a top producer - I was very inexperienced in the studio. And I associated Foreigner with solid hard rock and AOR radio and things like that, but they said that they had a couple of really great ballads and that they wanted to take a different approach to them. I think to be listening to commercial radio in 1981 and to hear 15 seconds of ambient music coming out on the front of the song was very unusual. A journalist said, 'This is a radical approach for Foreigner, who's responsible for it?' They would see my name on the credits, and go, 'Well, who is this guy?' So I think that it actually contributed in large part to there being a receptive atmosphere for when I came out with my solo stuff."

Dolby would later work with Lange on Def Leppard's Pyromania album, and Lange sang backup for Dolby on "She Blinded Me With Science."

This may be the biggest hit single in US chart history that never made it to #1. It spent an astounding 10 weeks at #2, but had the misfortune of peaking at the same time as Olivia Newton-John's even more massive hit "Physical," which spent 10 weeks at the top spot. But even when "Physical" finally fell out of #1, "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" by Daryl Hall and John Oates leapfrogged ahead of this song into the #1 spot. The week after that, "Centerfold" by the J. Geils Band knocked the Hall and Oates song to #2 and this song to #3. In 2002, "Work It" by Missy Elliott matched this song's dubious chart feat, also staying at #2 for 10 weeks without hitting #1.