Waiting for a Girl Like You

Jones and Gramm wrote it, Lange and Jones produced, and it was the second US single from 4, with "I'm Gonna Win" on the B-side. It is 4:49 on the album and 4:35 as a single, released in the US on October 2, 1981 and the UK on December 4. Jones said there is a song he had no control over, that it just came out, and Gramm told Songfacts that Jones sent cassettes of short riffs, that Jones had a verse melody but no chorus, and that they shelved it until a two-note piano figure that sounded Eastern, transposed, unlocked the chorus. Gramm made piano, drum machine and vocal demos for management and Kalodner. Wikipedia credits Ian McDonald with the opening motif as a writer, the official credits are Jones and Gramm only. Gramm's autobiography describes a dark-haired woman in the control room while he sang, but Stereogum reports he later admitted making that up.

Thomas Dolby told daMusic that he built a Mellotron-like sound by recording a sustained note on each multitrack track and combining harmonics, in one night at Electric Lady; the next morning the bassist called it a bit like massage music, and Lange and Jones liked it. It runs about 15 seconds, Wikipedia says Minimoog drones, and Stereogum says he got no songwriting credit. Dolby used the session money to fund his solo career. Gramm said they used only the one particular haunting line of his synthesizer.

It debuted on the Hot 100 on October 10, 1981 and peaked at 2 for a record ten weeks, blocked by Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" and then Hall and Oates's "I Can't Go for That". It was number 1 on mainstream rock, 5 on adult contemporary, 8 in the UK, 2 in Canada and 3 in Australia, and Billboard ranks it 100th on its Hot 100 all-time list. Setlist.fm counts 1,308 plays. It appears in Footloose, Can't Hardly Wait and While We're Young, and on TV in Stranger Things and Moonlighting. A 1999 recording, Nearly Unplugged, is on the 2002 reissue of 4. We could not confirm covers or samples, and do not know which video our upload is.