LOU GRAMM

I think we are looked upon as a veteran band.

It was kind of fun being the headliners.

For the next three plus years, I really was not in creative shape. That part of my brain was not functioning.

In those days it was pretty cut and dry. If you had a record company believing in you enough to cut an album then you had better have the ability to work the album on the road.

I gave my life to Christ about 1991.

Five years ago we were working on a new album when my health began failing.

You have to work with the ideas and give them a little push.

Beginning to create again was something that I took for granted but I never will take it for granted again.

Regardless what technology is, I like analog too.

It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.

I opted out of the band.

It's only in the seventies that I put the sticks down and I moved to the front.

We put out press releases to tell people what had happened to me and that I had a large weight gain but a lot of people still didn't know. The ones that didn't know were floored. That was a real humbling experience for me.

The future is finally something that we can now put into focus.

I was a drummer, and I did a little singing too.

After the accident Black Sheep was pretty much at an end.

We play some of my stuff and we play some Beatle covers.

We still play Foreigner songs. I play the songs that I was involved in writing.

It was really terrific but Foreigner was nothing like Yes and that style did not suit our music.

Without getting real personal, we liked our bass player Ed. He was a great guy and he was a good bass player but his playing was suited for a different style of band.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.

I go to the gym five days a week and I have a personal trainer. I am on a strict diet, which is kind of hard to keep up with on the road, but I stick to it as well as I can.

When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years.

I am starting to look like and perform like the Lou that I used to be.

I went in for an operation to remove a brain tumor.