“The song was an expression of my tempestuous private life. This stuff is real!”: The emotional ’80s ballad that’s just reached one billion streams

Mick Jones on stage in 1985.

“After writing the first three chords, I knew something was happening,” Mick Jones recalled of the night in 1984 when he wrote the song that gave his band Foreigner their biggest hit.

“I was writing in London at the time,” Jones said, “and wrote the introduction very late at night. It came to me very quickly, as some of the great songs usually do.”