The 1980s File Feature
Is This Love
Is This Love: Survivor Finds Its Tender Side on the Way to the Top Ten After "Eye of the Tiger" Few songs in rock history have carried the kind of commercial…
01 The Story
Is This Love: Survivor Finds Its Tender Side on the Way to the Top Ten
After "Eye of the Tiger"
Few songs in rock history have carried the kind of commercial and cultural weight that "Eye of the Tiger" placed on Survivor's shoulders after its 1982 release. Written for and featured in Rocky III, the song had defined a certain kind of muscular, motivational rock for an entire generation, becoming synonymous with effort, competition, and a very particular brand of American resilience that extended well beyond its soundtrack origins. Living after a song like that, continuing to make music in its long and demanding shadow while trying to grow and evolve as a band, presented a specific creative challenge with no obvious solution. Is This Love, released in 1986, was one of the band's most effective and most musically satisfying answers to that challenge.
A Nineteen-Week Chart Journey
Is This Love debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 25, 1986, at number 74, entering the chart with the quiet confidence of a track that had radio momentum already building behind it. The ascent was gradual and consistent through the autumn months: 55, 44, 36, 32, advancing steadily as the year turned and the song accumulated the kind of sustained radio support that only comes when programmers genuinely believe in what they are playing. The song reached its peak of number 9 on January 17, 1987, placing Survivor in the top ten and demonstrating that their audience had willingly followed them through a significant stylistic evolution from their arena-rock peak. 19 weeks on the Hot 100 total reflected genuine radio durability across two full seasonal cycles, autumn through winter, the kind of chart longevity that required consistent listener enthusiasm at every stage.
The Power Ballad as Commercial Vehicle
By 1986, the power ballad had become one of the most reliable commercial formats in rock music, capable of opening doors to adult contemporary radio that standard rock material could not unlock. Bands whose primary identity was built on harder-edged material were discovering that a well-crafted ballad could expand their demographic reach and produce chart performances that their regular rock material simply could not match in the mainstream pop conversation. Survivor navigated this territory with more grace than many of their contemporaries, partly because they had the right vocalist for the job. Lead vocalist Jimi Jamison, who had joined the band in 1984, possessed exactly the kind of voice that the power ballad format demanded: powerful enough for rock credibility, smooth enough for adult contemporary placement, and emotionally resonant enough to make the lyric's vulnerability feel genuinely experienced rather than commercially calculated.
The Album "When Seconds Count" and Its Place in the Catalog
Is This Love appeared on When Seconds Count, released in 1986, an album that found Survivor leaning deliberately into a more polished, radio-conscious sound without entirely abandoning the guitar-driven energy that had built their reputation and their audience over the previous decade. The production choices throughout the album reflected a band navigating the central creative tension for virtually every hard rock act in the mid-1980s: the need to balance authenticity with commercial adaptability in a market that was changing its preferences faster than artists could comfortably track. The song's melodic hook was strong enough to carry the weight of that tension, delivering something that felt earned and genuine rather than cynically calculated for crossover. The top-ten placement confirmed that the balance had been successfully achieved.
A Band in Transition
Survivor's career arc in the years following "Eye of the Tiger" is a study in the specific challenge of sustaining momentum after a defining and defining cultural moment that could never be fully escaped or fully equaled. Is This Love represents the band at a point of genuine creative vitality, finding new ways to connect with audiences without simply attempting to reproduce past formulas or ride the nostalgia of one unforgettable song. The track asked whether love was real, and in asking with sincerity and with a properly anthemic arrangement, it gave listeners something to hold onto through the cold months of late 1986 and early 1987. Press play and hear a band discovering that tenderness, delivered with conviction and a strong melody, can reach just as far as thunder.
"Is This Love" - Survivor's singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of Is This Love: The Question at the Heart of Commitment
Uncertainty as Romantic Honesty
There is something unusually and refreshingly honest about a love song structured as a question rather than a confident declaration. Most romantic pop music chooses the posture of certainty in one form or another: I love you, you are the one, this is forever, nothing will change. Is This Love takes the less comfortable opposite approach, framing the central emotional experience as a genuine and open inquiry rather than a settled conclusion. The narrator is not performing certainty for the listener's benefit; he is genuinely trying to understand what he is feeling, whether the depth and quality of emotion he is experiencing qualifies as the thing the word love is supposed to describe. This willingness to ask the real question rather than leap to the reassuring answer gives the song a credibility that more certain love songs sometimes lack.
The Phenomenology of New Love
The question "is this love?" is most naturally and most authentically asked at a specific moment in romantic experience: when feelings have intensified to the point where ordinary vocabulary feels insufficient, but when the narrator has not yet arrived at the conventional declarations of commitment and permanence. This is the threshold moment, the emotional territory that exists between "I like you" and "I love you," where the feeling is real and powerful and potentially transformative but its full nature is still being understood and examined. Survivor's lyric captures that threshold with precision and without romanticizing or overdramatizing it, which is why the question in the title does not feel evasive or confused but rather truthful about a genuine and widely shared state of emotional becoming.
The Power Ballad as Emotional Vehicle
The genre context of the song shapes its meaning in ways that are important to acknowledge. Power ballads of the mid-1980s occupied a specific and well-defined emotional register: they were expressions of large feeling, delivered with enough sonic scale to suggest that the emotion they described was correspondingly large and worthy of the production investment. When Jimi Jamison asks "is this love" against a backdrop of swelling guitars and carefully polished production, the question acquires a dramatic weight that a quieter and more intimate arrangement would not have produced in the same way. The musical scale of the performance implicitly answers the question even as the lyric continues to pose it: feelings that require this much sonic space can only be one thing.
Why the Question Resonates Across Decades
The specific emotional uncertainty that the song captures, the experience of trying to name a feeling that is larger and more significant than what you usually encounter in your daily life, is not historically bounded to any particular era or cultural moment. People have asked themselves this question in every generation and will continue to do so as long as people fall in love and try to understand what is happening to them. What changes across time is the sonic clothing in which the question arrives; what stays constant is the feeling itself and the genuine difficulty of naming it accurately. The song's enduring listenability reflects this combination of a timeless emotional premise and the specific sonic language of its moment, which has since acquired its own distinct nostalgic charm.
Commitment as a Choice, Not Just a Feeling
Embedded in the question "is this love?" is a related and equally important inquiry: if it is, what follows from that recognition? The song implicitly understands that naming a feeling carries real consequences and real obligations, that calling something love means accepting everything that comes with that designation in terms of vulnerability and commitment. The narrator's uncertainty is not simply emotional confusion or romantic immaturity. It is a form of seriousness, a willingness to be honest before committing to something of real weight and significance. That moral seriousness inside a power ballad is part of what gives the song its lasting emotional resonance beyond its initial chart success.
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