Lou Gramm plans to retire in 2025, after releasing a solo album and touring. The founding Foreigner vocalist, who left the band for good in 2002, revealed his plan in a new interview.
“I’m releasing a solo album in January, which I can’t wait for it to hit the airways,” Gramm explained. “I think I’m going to go [tour] until May or June of next year and then I’m going to go off the road. And that’s gonna be it for me.”
“I’ve got things that I’ve had to put aside because of touring,” the 74-year-old musician went on to say, noting that he wants to spend “a lot of time” with his 7-year-old daughter. He'd also like to focus more on hobbies.
“I’m a classic and muscle car collector. I’ve got a small but awesome collection of cars. And I live in a place in Rochester, New York where you can’t drive them year round,” Gramm said. “It’s April through the end of October and then you’ve got to put them away some place. And April through October is when I’m usually on the road, so I don’t get to drive them before we go on the road, and by the time we come off, the snow’s flying.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gramm detailed his upcoming album. “Half of my new album is brand new songs and the other half is songs that were great ideas but not finished enough to be on my earlier albums,” he revealed. “For the last two years I’ve been working on songs and listening back to my early solo albums. I’ve got the master tapes and although there’s 10 songs on the album, we usually write 13 songs and we pick the best 10 or the 10 that are finished and put them on the album. Well, I’ve gone back and looked at the other 3 songs that weren’t finished. And a lot of them are great ideas, there just wasn’t time to finish them. So I hear some of these ideas that I think could be great songs, and I finished them.”
The singer-songwriter's last solo album was 2009's Lou Gramm Band.