I Want To Know What Love Is

Well, as this blog is prone to do, it's time to take a detour from my ramblings to spotlight some musical meanderings instead.

The video above speaks for itself, but the reason I've posted this interview from November 2009 is because I've been recently listening to the new Lou Gramm Band cd. And it makes me realize what a testimony Lou Gramm has. It would be enough if he was just a famous rock singer turned Christian. But add in the brain tumor and wow!

The interview above (please watch now) doesn't really do justice to the seriousness of Gramm's 1997 illness.

"You know, when you find out you have a tumor in your brain the size of an egg, it changes everything," Gramm told the New York Daily News in 2007. "Even though it was benign, it threatened my life. All of the best minds in Rochester and New York City shied away from it -- and that kind of shook me up."

He actually was watching 20/20 when he saw a segment about a new laser surgery by this one doctor (Peter Black), so he called.

"I got a hold of his office that day and by that Thursday I was in the operating room. For 19 hours," he told the Daily News.

Gramm was already a Christian by that point, but the tumor put the halt on building the momentum Foreigner had from the success of its previous album, Mr. Moonlight.

Gramm hurried back and went on tour with Foreigner again from 1998 to 2002, while still recovering. The surgery impacted his voice, his adrenal glands and caused him to gain a great deal of weight before he quit Foreigner for good in 2002.

Two years later, he formed the Lou Gramm Band, including two of his brothers. His health is the best it has been since the surgery and while he still plays his solo and Foreigner hits, the words of the infamous I Want to Know What Love Is take on a different meaning, just as the video hints at:

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me,
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
I 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