Luis Maldonado remembers being about 5 years old when he listened for the first time to a Foreigner song. It was the late ’70s in Mexico, in the border city of Nogales, Sonora, where he could dial the family’s radio into the rock stations in Arizona.
“It was ‘Feels Like the First Time,’ and I just remember hearing all those sounds, you know, the keyboards, the big guitars — I’m like, ‘Wow, listen to that sound!’ That’s kind of what made me obsessed with music,” he tells Billboard Español. Little did he know that, decades later, he would end up fronting the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer band.
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Born in Nogales and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Maldonado immigrated to the United States shortly after with his family, where his father — an electronic engineer — found a job in the semiconductor industry. But music was always part of the household: His grandfather was a violin player and an orchestra conductor; his dad also sang and played guitar.
Watching Maldonado perform with Foreigner is an electrifying experience. Perfectly in sync, band and frontman sound and feel as though they’ve been together from the very beginning, despite the many lineup changes over the years. Today, Mick Jones is the only founding member remaining (although he cannot longer tour), with original singer Lou Gramm — who said earlier this month he plans to retire from live performance by the end of 2026 — joining them onstage on selected dates of their ongoing 50th Anniversary Tour.
But Maldonado, a natural-born rock star with countless charisma and the vocal range to hit the signature high notes made famous by Gramm and his successor Kelly Hansen in timeless songs like “Juke Box Hero” and “Cold as Ice,” was not always a singer. At age 7, the middle of three brothers picked up the guitar, moving later to upright bass, drums, piano, flute and cello. “I grew up in the orchestra,” he explains, “I wanted everything to do with anything that made sound”.
It wasn’t until his teenage years, when he joined his older brother’s band, that he became a vocalist. “I was like 14 or so, we were recording some songs and my brother David goes, ‘Here, you’re going to sing this because you have a good voice,'” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘But I’m not a singer!” I sang the song, and he goes, ‘OK, you’re gonna be the singer in the band.’ I was like, ‘OK’ — so I studied voice, and I sang for a long time.”
Eventually relocating to California, he formed his own band as a singer and guitar player, Into the Presence, and even got a record deal around 2008, he says. “The drummer was Tim Alexander, who used to play in Primus. I met my wife [Ana Lenchantin] in that band; she played cello, and her sister Paz was the bass player. We just made one record. We tried to take it as far as we could but, you know, everybody in the band worked for other groups too. So Tim went back to Primus, Paz eventually went on to be in the Pixies. My wife was working for different groups, like Norilsk, Gnarls Barkley, No Doubt… And I just kept singing and singing. I kind of kept it at the same level as all my other abilities.”
(L-R) Bruce Watson, Luis Maldonado, Jeff Pilson, Chris Frazier and Joel Hoekstra of Foreigner perform at Avenir Centre on October 25, 2025 in Moncton, New Brunswick. Dale Preston/Getty ImagesIt was 2021 when his good friend Michael Bluestein, who became Foreigner’s keyboardist in 2008, called to tell him that the band was “looking for a guy,” as multi-instrumentalist Thom Gimbel was retiring.
“He said, ‘I know you’re in another band. What do you think? Would you give it some thought?’,” Maldonado recounts. “It really didn’t take much time to think about all those great songs — I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go play some music.’ A couple days later I got a call from Jeff Pilson, who’s the bass player and a musical director, and he goes: ‘Let’s get together and play.’ And it was real. Just simple like that. So I showed up to Third Encore [Studios] in Burbank, you know, this big old rehearsal, and we just got in a room and we started playing. It was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible’.”
Joining that year as rhythm guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, Maldonado was there in October 2024 when Foreigner was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. One year later, after filling in on vocals during a Latin American tour, he officially became the lead singer, succeeding longtime frontman Kelly Hansen.
“There’s a lot of energy [on stage], like a lot of electricity, and I think that has a lot to do with our relationship to each other,” he says of his bandmates. “When I joined the group, there was very much a connection with each other, very much like a family. It was very unlike any other group or artist I’d ever been with. We all have kind of the same spirit. And to be honest, I have to give credit to Mick Jones, because he’s the one who handpicked everybody in this band.”
Jones, who in 2024 revealed his battle with Parkinson’s disease and can no longer tour, “is still the captain of the ship,” Maldonado assures, noting that he remains very much involved in every decision. “This is Mick’s band,” he adds. Even if there are no original members left onstage, “Foreigner is them and it’s us together — us as the working band, them as the founders.”
Foreigner, who just this Friday (July 24) released the new In the Eye of the Storm (Live) set, has also taken advantage of Maldonado’s heritage as a Mexican-American. In May 2025, the band released Spanish versions of classics like “I Want to Know What Love Is” — “Quiero Saber Si Es Amor,” featuring Joy Huerta (from Latin pop siblings duo Jesse & Joy) — and “Urgent.”
“For me, the gift was being able to be part of it as a Latino connecting to people on at that level,” he says. “But you want to know what? When we played these [live in Latin America], no one knew what was coming. And when I started singing in Spanish, you would see people cheering, you’d see people crying.”
And more music could be on the way, both original and re-recorded, Maldonado hints.
“We have been talking very seriously about recording new material. And, like, taking songs from the vaults, songs that had never been released and maybe re-recording them,” he says. “Lou and I have talked about, ‘Hey, we should do a song together.’ So there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of things that we’re trying to land on because we’re in this new creative space right now. And we’ve got a lot of green lights right now to do that.”
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