Is This Love
The chorus of this song is a question.
Not a rhetorical one. Not a statement wearing a question’s clothes. David Coverdale — a man who had built a career on telling you exactly how he felt and exactly what he wanted — sat down in 1987 and wrote a chorus that asks: Is this love that I’m feeling? He didn’t know. He said so, out loud, on a record built for arenas.
First, the honest accounting, because the packaging is famous and the packaging is silly. The hair was ridiculous. The video had Tawny Kitaen doing gymnastics on a car. The band wore spandex. It was 1987, and that was normal. None of it has anything to do with what the song is doing, and all of it has made the song easy to dismiss ever since. Easy, and wrong.
Whitesnake was not in the feelings business. They made songs for nodding your head, for appreciating the guitar tone, for driving too fast and making questionable decisions. “Here I Go Again.” “Still of the Night.” Sex and swagger, certainty as a product. The catalog up to this point told you things. It announced. It never wondered.
Then he wrote this one, and instead of telling, he asked.
That is not a small shift. A power ballad usually works the same way the fast songs do, only slower — the singer still knows all the answers, and you are just along for the ride. This song breaks that contract. A guy in leather pants stands up in front of an arena and admits he has no idea what is happening to him. The bravado cracks. Something real gets through the crack.
Listen to what John Sykes does with the guitar. He doesn’t shred here. The melodic runs in the chorus are searching for something, not showing off — and even when the song climbs to its full arena-rock size, the uncertainty stays. The arrangement gets bigger. The answer never comes. The question hangs there at full volume until the song ends, still open.
That is the arrangement telling the same truth the lyric tells. Love doesn’t come with answers. It comes with more questions.
It is an easy song to be embarrassed by. Too soft. Too earnest. Too much like something that slow-danced at a wedding in 1989.
And then you get older. You fall in love, maybe more than once, and at some point you find yourself awake at 2 AM wondering whether what you feel is real or just chemicals and wishful thinking.
Turns out David Coverdale — ridiculous hair, spandex, Tawny Kitaen and all — knew something the embarrassment missed.
Here is what the song claims, and I believe it is right: certainty is not the proof of love. If you are certain, you are feeling something else — something simpler, something with less at stake. The asking is the evidence. You stand inside the thing and you still have to ask whether it is real, and the asking doesn’t stop just because you are living it.
So the chorus never resolves, because it can’t. It was never a riddle waiting on an answer. It was a man reporting, accurately, what the inside of this feels like.
Is this love that I’m feeling?
Thirty-seven years later, I’m still not sure.
That’s how I know it is.
