The album's name signifies that it is the band's fourth studio album and also the fact that the band's membership had reduced from six to four members. Musically, it showed Foreigner shifting from hard rock to more accessible mainstream rock and pop music.[8]
The album was a success worldwide, holding the #1 position on the Billboard album chart for a total of 10 weeks. It eventually sold over six million copies in the U.S. alone.
Background and writing
The album was originally titled Silent Partners and later was changed to 4,[9] reflecting both the fact that it was Foreigner's fourth album and that the band now consisted of four members. In 1981, art studio Hipgnosis was asked to design a cover based on the original title, and it developed a black-and-white image of a young man in bed with a pair of binoculars suspended in the air overhead.[10] The design was rejected by the band as they felt that it was "too homosexual."[9] The replacement cover for 4 was designed by Bob Defrin and modeled after an old fashioned film leader. Hipgnosis received credit for the design of the label.
Both Ian McDonald and Al Greenwood had departed the group before the recording of 4, partly because they wanted to take a more significant role in writing songs while Mick Jones wanted to control the songwriting along with Lou Gramm.[11][12] As a result, all of the songs on the album are compositions by Jones and/or Gramm. McDonald, who had played saxophone, and Greenwood, who had played keyboards, were replaced by session musicians, including Junior Walker, who played the saxophone solo in the bridge of "Urgent", and a young Thomas Dolby.
During the course of the 10 months in which the album was recorded, the starting time of the band's daily work in the recording studio transitioned from noon to midnight.[11] This changing schedule inspired the opening song on the album, "Night Life."[11] According to Jones, "The later it got at night, the bigger the buzz got, and a lot of weird characters, some of them hookers, would appear. It was a big mixture of a lot of different characters – so that was the inspiration for opening song, 'Night Life.'”[11]
Reception
The editors of Classic Rock called 4 Foreigner's "masterpiece."[13]Ultimate Classic Rock critic Matt Wardlaw rated four of the songs from 4—"Juke Box Hero," "Waiting for a Girl Like You," "Urgent" and "Night Life"—among Foreigner's top 10 songs.[14]Ultimate Classic Rock critic Eduardo Rivadavia rated two of the songs from 4—"Girl on the Moon" and "Woman in Black"—among Foreigner's 10 most-underrated songs.[15]Classic Rock critic Malcolm Dome also rated two songs from 4 among Foreigner's 10 most underrated—"I’m Gonna Win," which he compares to "Juke Box Hero," at #8 and "Night Life,"—which he praises for its "confident energy," at #1.[16]PopMatters critic Evan Sawdey called "Night Life" a "remarkably limp album opener."[17]
Mick Jones has rated three of the songs from 4 ("Urgent," "Juke Box Hero" and "Girl on the Moon") among his 11 favorite Foreigner songs.[18]
Track listing
All tracks are written by Mick Jones, with additional songwriting by Lou Gramm on tracks 1-2, 4-5 and 9-10.
4 was released in 2001 in multichannel DVD-Audio,[20] and on September 14, 2011, on hybrid stereo-multichannel Super Audio CD by Warner Japan in its Warner Premium Sound series.[21] It was rereleased in June 2015 by Atlantic Records as premium 180-gram vinyl with its original 1981 track listing.
^Deggans, Eric (1998). "Foreigner". In Graff, Gary; Durchholz, Daniel (eds.). MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. pp. 446–447.
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