When It's Love

Album: OU812 (1988)
Charted: 28 5
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • "When It's Love" is a group collaboration on writing, with brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen having composed the music first and Sammy Hagar writing the lyrics afterwards. The song is Van Halen's third biggest hit, after "Jump" (#1) and "Why Can't This Be Love?" (#3). One of the more powerful of power ballads, VH1 put it at #24 on their list of the 25 Greatest Power Ballads.
  • The album OU812 is a common little text pun (phonetically working out to "Oh, you ate one, too!") that's been bopping around in culture for years. It's on the wall of the set in the TV series Taxi, it's the license plate on the Ferrari in Cheech & Chong's Next Movie, and other such monkeyshines.
  • Van Halen, rarely known for their deep, meaningful lyrics, turn in a standard job verses-wise here. Let's put it this way: The first line, "Everybody's looking for something," verbatim, also shows up in the songs "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" and Olivia Newton-John's "I'll Bet You A Kangaroo," with countless more "everybody's lookin'" phrases in other songs. Love, apparently, lasts forever and is experienced by two people together, say thousands of other songs as well. Somebody should just make a set of love-song-lyrics refrigerator magnets.

    We're just pointing out, however, that it's to the band's credit that the lyrics come off as incredibly poignant and thoughtful when set to their distinctive music.
  • Sammy Hagar was uncomfortable in front of the camera for music videos and never wanted his performances to appear phony. "The more you saw yourself on video, the more you realized when you were faking it, it looked really stupid," he told the UK TV show Video Killed the Radio Star. His solution was to crank up the music and really belt out the songs instead of lip-syncing. Because of this, he blew out his voice while filming the Darek Wolski-directed performance clip for this song and couldn't perform at a concert the next day.

Comments: 1

  • David - Lee from BeantownWho is the Singer? Luv his emotions. It's not the imposter, the other David Lee.lol
see more comments

Editor's Picks

Rush: Album by Album - A Conversation With Martin Popoff

Rush: Album by Album - A Conversation With Martin PopoffSong Writing

A talk with Martin Popoff about his latest book on Rush and how he assessed the thousands of albums he reviewed.

Songs About Movies

Songs About MoviesSong Writing

Iron Maiden, Adele, Toto, Eminem and Earth, Wind & Fire are just some of the artists with songs directly inspired by movies - and not always good ones.

Tony Joe White

Tony Joe WhiteSongwriter Interviews

The writer of "Rainy Night in Georgia" and "Polk Salad Annie" explains how he cooks up his Louisiana swamp rock.

Lita Ford

Lita FordSongwriter Interviews

Lita talks about how they wrote songs in The Runaways, and how she feels about her biggest hit being written by somebody else.

Michael Schenker

Michael SchenkerSongwriter Interviews

The Scorpions and UFO guitarist is also a very prolific songwriter - he explains how he writes with his various groups, and why he was so keen to get out of Germany and into England.

Bass Player Scott Edwards

Bass Player Scott EdwardsSong Writing

Scott was Stevie Wonder's bass player before becoming a top session player. Hits he played on include "I Will Survive," "Being With You" and "Sara Smile."