There’s a particular way people talk when the past suddenly taps them on the shoulder and asks for a favor. For Lou Gramm, it sounded like unfinished songs from 1981 politely demanding to be finished four decades later. Not rewritten. Not “reimagined.” Just… done.
“It’s funny how those anniversaries all get jumbled up,” Gramm said, trying to keep straight whether we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of Foreigner, the 40th anniversary of 4, or both at once. The answer, as it turns out, is yes. And the reason he’s popping back onstage with the band for select dates is tied directly to that math problem. “There were some songs that were recorded during the time of that album that weren’t finished,” he said. “They were really good. They just weren’t finished. So we finished them.”
That’s the most Lou Gramm way possible to describe what fans would kill to hear: vault tracks from the era that gave us “Urgent,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” and “Juke Box Hero.” No mythologizing. No preciousness. Just logistics. “You couldn’t put more than ten songs on an album back then,” he said. “If you did more than that, the space between the cuts would start to distort.”
Which means songs like “Love So Much Better” weren’t rejected so much as benched. “That’s all. That’s the reason,” he shrugged. “There just wasn’t time to finish them.”
Finishing them now meant something very specific: not updating them to sound modern, but matching the past so closely that you can’t see the seam. “I had an open vocal track,” Gramm said, “and I would sing along with the song. Then we’d listen to the two together. If I needed a little more grit or bite, I could do that. We ended up matching the vocal sounds to a T.”
That part still amazes him. “Very lucky,” he said, flatly. “To put the 24-track on there and hear the sounds as they were back in that day, then sing to them again—it really ignited something in me.”
It also reminded him how stacked those records were to begin with. “Every album we recorded, we had enough for the album and two or three extra ones,” he said. “Sometimes they were just as good. But we had deadlines. After touring and making the next record, you forget about them… until you start listening again and go, ‘We’ve got to finish this.’”
And yes, there are more. “From every album, there’s two or three,” he said. Fans, naturally, love it. “It was that special time and place.”
That same balancing act—honoring the past without letting it own you—comes up when Gramm talks about performing now. With Foreigner, he’s sharing vocal duties, and the rules are refreshingly sane. “They let me pick first,” he said. “I’m only doing four or five songs. I pick my favorites. We scatter them throughout the set.”
If they hadn’t? “I might have told them nothing doing,” he laughed.
The current shows are structured, though: 4, front to back, in order. “We’re doing the whole album,” he said. “Then we’ll do ‘I Want to Know What Love Is,’ ‘Juke Box Hero,’ and a bunch of others.” Nostalgia, yes—but disciplined nostalgia.
That discipline didn’t come easy. Gramm’s story about touring nonstop in the early ’80s lands like a gut punch disguised as a punchline. After being dropped off at home at 2:30 a.m. following months on the road, he crept inside to find his three-year-old son coming down the stairs. “I said, ‘Matthew, Daddy’s home,’” he recalled. “He smiled… and then he screams, ‘Mommy.’ He didn’t recognize me.”
Funny. Brutal. Unavoidable.
“You can’t go out there and beat yourself up just for the almighty dollar,” Gramm said now. “It takes a toll after a while.” He spoke candidly about getting sober in the ’90s and choosing a different way to exist on the road. “I made the conscious decision that that’s not what I wanted anymore,” he said. “I’ve been about 34 years sober now.”
The payoff surprised him. “After I got sober, I had some of the best shows of my career.”
That clarity carries straight into what’s next. Gramm’s first new solo album in years arrives in March, with a single due in early February. It’s built the same way as those resurrected Foreigner tracks: old ideas, finished properly. “It’s a little conglomerate of past and present,” he said. “It rocks hard.”
Why? Because he still thinks like a drummer. “The rhythm of how I phrase things and place them in a song—that comes from that,” he said. “It plays off the rhythm.”
At this point, Gramm isn’t chasing reinvention. He’s closing loops, reopening doors, and deciding exactly how long to stay out. Playing the hits. Playing the almost-hits. Going home when it matters. And finally finishing what was already good enough the first time around.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
