Fifty years ago, Mick Jones was at loose ends.
By then a music veteran — with session credits for George Harrison, Peter Frampton and Johnny Hallyday, and membership in Spooky Tooth — Jones had just made an acrimonious departure from the Leslie West Band and was looking for his next move. Suffice it to say, the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter found a good one.
Foreigner is still going strong since Jones formed the band in New York during 1976 with an Anglo-American lineup that included King Crimson alumnus Ian McDonald and frontman Lou Gramm from the Rochester, N.Y. band Black Sheep. During its heyday (1977-87) Foreigner released seven consecutive platinum-or-better albums, earning 14 top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 — four of which were also No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Airplay chart.
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All told, the group has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide and was, after a long wait, inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2024.
“It’s kind of mind-boggling,” the 81-year-old Jones, who’s been sidelined from performing since 2022 by Parkinson’s disease, tells Billboard. “I wanted it to be a band that had the ability to choose its own direction. I needed it to have a palette, to be able to choose from different colors and different sounds and different directions. It had to have the ability to travel through different styles and create a different sort of style.
“Fifty years is a long time,” he adds, “and I am certainly proud of the fact. I did not have any idea that Foreigner would have such a long life…. The life expectations of band was pretty low when we started. So what’s happened has been unbelievable, really.”
Perhaps just as hard to fathom is that Foreigner retains headliner status without Jones or any of the group’s other original/primary members involved — at least not in a full-time capacity. It’s a distinction it shares with other classic rock acts such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, its partner on this summer’s Double Trouble Double Vision Tour, as well as bands such as Yes, Quiet Riot, Blood, Sweat & Tears and others. Why that’s the case is no mystery to Jones, however; to paraphrase a Clinton-era political slogan, it’s the songs, stupid.
“We never made an effort to play the game of publicity-seeking rock stars,” Jones explains. “Our focus was on the music in the studio and on stage and the live shows speak for themselves. The result is that few of the fans that love our music can actually name Foreigner’s original band members…but they know the songs.” Adds Phil Carson, the longtime record executive who’s been Foreigner’s manager since 2004, “It’s the songs that are important for Foreigner. They don’t have a Jimmy (Page) and Robert (Plant) or a Mick (Jagger) and Keith (Richards). Lou and Mick were really kind of invisible to the wider public.
“But that, in fact, worked to our advantage. It’s all about the songs and the presentation of them. They’re brilliant songs; if you can perform them brilliantly, people will still come out to hear them.”
That Was Yesterday
It wasn’t an easy road getting there, however.
Before 2004, the band had been through a couple of breakups, often stemming from disagreements between Jones and Gramm, who were also Foreigner’s songwriting tandem. Gramm left during the early ‘90s but came back on board, though he also struggled after having surgery during 1997 to remove a brain tumor. He left for good in 2003, leaving Jones once again at a crossroads. Encouraged by Carson he assembled a new lineup, anchored by Dokken bassist Jeff Pilson — who is Foreigner’s musical director — and Jason Bonham, son of the late Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. (Yes alumnus Trevor Rabin was also recruited but had to decline due to film scoring duties.) Hurricane vocalist Kelly Hansen became Foreigner’s new frontman in 2005 and held the position for 20 years.
“I was begging for $20,000 shows in 2005,” Carson recalls. “When I was booking that first tour, promoters said, ‘Have you got Lou Gramm?’ No, but we’ve got Jason Bonham; ‘Oh, that’s pretty good.’ That really enabled me to get shows…and eventually it started and we managed to rebuild it.”
Carson’s belief in the Foreigner’s catalog was also bolstered by an encounter that year on an airplane, while speaking to the passenger sitting next to him. “The inevitable conversation, ‘What do you do?’ ‘Well, I manage rock bands.’ ‘Who?’ I said, ‘No, not The Who’ (laughs), Foreigner.’ The guy said, I’ve never heard of Foreigner,’ so I started singing the songs and he knew every one of them. That’s the point the penny dropped for me and the mantra and way of promoting Foreigner is that the songs are the brand. From that moment on every print ad I took out had six or seven song titles in it.”
Carson subsequently enlisted the J. Walter Thompson ad agency to create a campaign for the band that included a film, featuring Hansen, that built its dialogue around key Foreigner lyrics. Besides reminding fans of those songs, it also helped Foreigner net placements in films such as Happy Gilmore and, more recently, Stranger Things. “This was a big band, but people were not recognizing it,” Carson notes. “Because of things like that, we started to get younger people in the audience. This band (lineup) is the only Foreigner those people know. They don’t know anything about any older band. It’s Foreigner to them.”
The group — which has released one new studio album, 2009’s Can’t Slow Down, and some live sets since reforming — has been holding up its end on the road, including both headlining theater and amphitheater tours as well as packages with Styx, Whitesnake and Skynyrd. “It’s all kinda happened organically, which is beautiful,” Pilson says. “We do work really hard and play these songs the best we can and honor the great history and the heritage that (Foreigner) has with its fans.” It’s even made a believer out of Gramm, who, since 2017, has been making guest appearances with Foreigner at select dates, as some of the band’s other alumni. He’s also gotten past differences with Jones – with whom he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013 — and Hansen.
“Ever since (the Rock Hall induction) it felt like, personally, I had to find a way to let go of some of the things I’ve been holding onto for years,” says Gramm, who’s dropping the solo album Released, featuring unreleased songs from his three previous albums, on March 27. “They’ve done a great job over the last two decades of keeping the name up there and flying the flag. They deserve a lot of credit.”
Reaction to Action
Foreigner is, in fact, filled with fresh momentum as it heads into its 50th anniversary. An announced Historic Farewell Tour from 2023-24 changed direction after Hansen decided to depart, with Luis Maldonado — a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, who’d joined as a guitarist in 2021 — phased in as the new frontman. That’s also opened some new vistas for Foreigner: the group toured Latin America last year with Maldonado out front (and Gramm guesting); and it’s recorded Spanish-language versions of Foreigner hits, including a duet version of the Hot 100-topper “I Want to Know What Love Is” with Joy Huerta of the Latin Grammy-winning duo Jesse & Joy.
“There’s just a lot of forward movement, and the band is incredibly excited,” Pilson reports. “It’s creating a unified front. We’re able to integrate everything, not only with Lou but everything about Foreigner, into the present. Making this change, with Luis, with Mick and Lou’s endorsement and having the whole organization working more together, has just been such a positive thing.”
There’s been new music as well. During the fall of 2024 the group placed the unreleased 1996 track “Turning Back the Time” on a compilation of the same name, while another unreleased song, “Fool If You Love Him,” was added to last year’s reissue of the 1981 album 4. And Jones promises there’s more to come.
“Lou and I recorded a lot of songs that didn’t make it onto any of our albums…like ‘Fool If You Love Him,’” says Jones, who also met up in New York a few months ago with Pilson, Maldonado and Gramm. “It was great to see Lou again and spend some time with him reminiscing and sharing a few laughs. What is exciting is that Lou and Luis have developed a great relationship and they may be working together on some other hidden gems that have been lying on a shelf.”
Hot Blooded
There’s even more in the works for the 50th anniversary celebration this year.
Foreigner begins a The Hits Unplugged acoustic tour on Feb. 25 in Colorado and also has The Greatest Hits Orchestral dates during March in Las Vegas and California. Gramm will be with the band again during April in Florida for shows featuring the 4 album, and prior to the tour with Skynyrd the band will be on the road in Europe, including a June 5 appearance at the Sweden Rock Festival.
Having shelved an initial try at a stage piece, Jukebox Hero, during the late 2010s, another one, Feels Like the First Time — the Foreigner Musical, will be premiered by Long Island University’s Post Theatre Company on April 17 for a nine-day run in the school’s Tilles Center for the Performing Arts. Tony Award-nominated Broadway veteran Adam Pascal (Rent, Aida, Chicago, Cabaret) will direct, with a book by Stephen Garvey and choreography by Lorna Ventura. Original Foreigner keyboardist Al Greenwood will be present on opening night, and Carson says there are plans to take the show on the road at some point.
On tap for the summer, meanwhile, is a feature-length documentary by George Scott, a Scottish director who’s made films about Jimi Hendrix and Duran Duran, among others. Carson hopes the as-yet-untitled project will be in theaters this summer; it will include a rendition of Foreigner’s first hit, “Feels Like the First Time,” recorded last September at Ellis Island with Gramm, Hansen and Maldonado all singing. Foreigner also recorded a rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that should see release this year as well.
The band also plans to commemorate the 50th anniversaries of its self-titled debut album during 2027 and Double Vision in 2028, while Carson says a deluxe package of 1979’s Head Games, similar to last year’s 4 collection, is being considered. Shows for 2027 are already being booked, and the first Foreigner date for 2028 is also on the books, according to Carson.
“I think that as long as people love the songs and like watching the band, we’ll probably be out there,” the manager predicts. “Everybody’s having a great time, so why not keep it going? It’s a great thing to have done in my time of life to have brought this band back to where it is, and to keep it going.”