Love songs are a dime a dozen, but great, swoon-worthy love songs that endure over the course of decades are less common. As a genre, classic rock is full of romantic tunes about love, but none more so than hit tracks by Aerosmith, Peter Gabriel, and Foreigner.
Videos by American Songwriter
“I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith
Not wanting to fall asleep because you’d miss the person you love is quite the romantic throughline for a song. Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” runs away with that premise as Steven Tyler croons, “Cause even when I dream of you / The sweetest dream would never do / I’d still miss you baby / And I don’t wanna miss a thing.“
Diane Warren penned the 1998 Oscar-nominated power ballad, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and served as the single for the movie Armageddon.
“I kind of knew it was a hit. But I didn’t really like the song,” drummer Joey Kramer told Classic Rock of the track. “I didn’t think that song was us. When I first heard it, it was just a demo with piano and singing. It was difficult to imagine what kind of touch Aerosmith could put on it and make it our own.”
“When we finally did make it our own, that’s when it became what it is. It was just a question of learning the song and playing it as a band,” he added. “As soon as we began playing it as a band, then it instantly became an Aerosmith song.”
“In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel
“In Your Eyes” was Peter Gabriel at his most romantic. The British singer released the track in 1985. It wound up topping the mainstream rock chart and being certified gold. It also became iconic for its use in the film Say Anything.
In a 1986 interview with SPIN, Gabriel revealed the inspiration for the song.
“On two recent trips to Senegal, it was explained to me that many of their love songs are left ambiguous. They could refer to the love between man and woman or the love between man and God,” he said. “That interested me, because in our society it’s a little like the sacred versus the profane. Church music, for instance, expresses a religious type of love, and romantic love belongs to the Devil, if you like. So I began playing in the lyric with a mixture of the two.”
Indeed, the song goes, “In your eyes / I see the doorway to a thousand churches / In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches / In your eyes / I see the light and the heat / In your eyes / Oh, I want to be that complete.”
“I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
As the music builds and Foreigner dives into the chorus of the classic rock hit, “I Want To Know What Love Is” —”I wanna know what love is / I want you to show me / I wanna feel what love is / I know you can show me“—listeners can feel the yearning and sincerity.
“‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ came up at three in the morning sometime in 1984,” Mick Jones told Classic Rock. “I don’t know where it came from.”
As such, Jones said that he considers “it a gift that was sent through me.”
“I think there was something bigger than me behind it,” he admitted. “I’d say it was probably written entirely by a higher force.”
Wherever it came from, the song was an unmitigated hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Photo by David Lefranc/Kipa/Sygma via Getty Images
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