01 The Story

Whitesnake: "Is This Love" (1987)

"Is This Love" by Whitesnake represents one of the most successful commercial pivots in hard rock history. When the song was released as a single in the autumn of 1987, it demonstrated that David Coverdale's band could translate the melodic sensibilities of their blues-rock foundation into polished, radio-ready power ballads capable of competing at the very highest levels of the Billboard Hot 100. The record climbed to number 2, making it one of the two biggest Hot 100 hits in Whitesnake's catalog and cementing their status as one of the defining rock acts of the late 1980s.

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 24, 1987, entering at number 53. Its ascent was methodical and steady: it moved through the 40s and 30s through November before reaching its peak of number 2 during the week of December 19, 1987. The record spent 19 weeks on the Hot 100, a remarkable run that underscored the sustained commercial appetite for the blend of hard rock instrumentation and melodic balladry that "Is This Love" embodied. It was kept from the top spot by other strong charting material of the period, but its near-miss at number one remained a defining achievement for the band.

The song was written by David Coverdale and John Sykes, though Sykes had already departed from the band's lineup by the time the album and its singles were being promoted. Sykes's guitar work was nonetheless central to the recorded version: his melodic lead playing and the song's signature guitar tones were already committed to tape before the personnel changes that characterized the turbulent internal history of Whitesnake in this period. The writing partnership produced a track whose structure was expertly engineered for both rock radio and the burgeoning format of MTV.

The album from which the single was drawn, Whitesnake (commonly referred to by fans as the "1987 album" to distinguish it from the band's earlier self-titled release), was issued by Geffen Records in April 1987. It became one of the best-selling hard rock albums of the decade, eventually moving more than eight million copies in the United States alone. The album produced two major Hot 100 hits: "Here I Go Again," which had actually been recorded in an earlier version for a previous album but was re-recorded for the 1987 release, reached number one, while "Is This Love" followed it to number 2. This combination of back-to-back top-five singles from a single album was an achievement that few rock acts of the era could match.

The music video for "Is This Love" received substantial rotation on MTV, where it benefited from the visual appeal of the production and from the presence of actress Tawny Kitaen, who had appeared in the video for "Here I Go Again" and whose association with the band became one of the defining visual signatures of Whitesnake's commercial peak. MTV's influence on the commercial fortunes of rock acts in the late 1980s cannot be overstated; for a song like "Is This Love," which possessed strong melodic hooks but was not as guitar-driven as some of the band's heavier material, the video format provided an ideal promotional vehicle.

Producer Keith Olsen, who handled the production of the 1987 album, gave the record a bright, clean sonic character well-suited to both FM radio and the CD format, which was beginning to supplant vinyl as the dominant commercial medium during this period. The production choices emphasized the melodic interplay between Coverdale's vocals and the guitar arrangements, creating a sound that was unmistakably rooted in hard rock while remaining accessible to listeners whose primary touchstone was the mainstream pop chart.

The success of "Is This Love" and its parent album repositioned Whitesnake in the commercial landscape of rock music. What had been understood primarily as a British hard rock act, rooted in the blues-rock tradition of the 1970s, was suddenly occupying the same chart real estate as the biggest American arena rock acts of the era. The transformation was commercially successful but also somewhat controversial among listeners who had followed the band through their earlier, rawer incarnations.

02 Song Meaning

Desire and Uncertainty: The Meaning of "Is This Love"

"Is This Love" by Whitesnake presents a narrator caught in a state of emotional suspension, experiencing feelings whose nature he is simultaneously certain of and uncertain about. The song's title poses a question rather than making a declaration, and this structural choice gives the entire record its distinctive emotional texture. The narrator is not performing confidence about his emotional state; he is genuinely interrogating it, arriving at the conclusion that what he is experiencing must be love because nothing else could account for its intensity.

This rhetorical move, framing an extreme emotional experience as evidence that it must be love even if the narrator cannot fully name it as such, was a characteristic device of the power ballad genre that dominated rock radio in the mid-to-late 1980s. What distinguishes "Is This Love" from many of its contemporaries is the degree to which David Coverdale's vocal delivery sells the uncertainty. The question in the title does not feel perfunctory; it sounds genuinely open-ended, as though the narrator is working something out in real time.

The song's imagery is built around physical sensation as the primary evidence of emotional reality. The narrator describes not feelings in the abstract but specific experiences: the way the beloved makes him feel, the physical effects of her presence, the sense that these responses are unprecedented in his experience. This grounds the song's emotional claims in something concrete and specific rather than leaving them at the level of generalization, a choice that makes the record feel more personal even when heard by a mass audience.

The guitar work, contributed principally by John Sykes, functions as a parallel emotional voice within the arrangement. The melodic lead lines that run through the song comment on and amplify the emotional content of Coverdale's lyrics, providing a musical equivalent of the uncertainty and longing the words describe. This call-and-response between voice and guitar is one of the most effective elements of the production, giving the song a layered emotional quality that supports repeated listening.

The power ballad format in which "Is This Love" operates had its own set of conventions and expectations by 1987, and the song works knowingly within those conventions while finding enough specific emotional detail to rise above formula. The tempo, the dynamics that build from a relatively restrained opening toward a more expansive chorus, the sustained guitar phrases that mark the song's emotional peaks: all of these are genre features that audiences of the era had been conditioned to associate with sincere emotional expression in a rock context.

Within the broader context of late-1980s rock, "Is This Love" also reflects the period's particular negotiation between masculine rock identity and the vulnerability that ballad performance required. The willingness to ask a question rather than make a declaration, to admit uncertainty about one's own feelings, was a significant gesture within a genre that had often privileged stoicism. The song's commercial success suggested that this vulnerability was not a commercial liability but an asset, a finding that many hard rock acts took to heart in the years that followed.