Songfacts®:

• "Is This Love?" is one of Alison Moyet's most popular songs. Reaching #3 in the UK, it's one of her biggest chart hits, and her top song on most streaming services.
  
  It's a lively song on a familiar subject: reaching that euphoric point with your partner where you realize you might be in love. A year later, Whitesnake had a hit with their "Is This Love?" a song with the same meaning but in a hair metal framework. Others to release songs with this title include Bob Marley and Survivor.
• This was the first single from Alison Moyet's second album, Raindancing. After making the rounds on the pub circuit as a blues singer in the late '70s and early '80s, she teamed up with Vince Clarke in 1981 to record a song his former band, Depeche Mode, turned down called "Only You." They called their duo Yazoo, and their pairing worked so well they decided to make an entire album. After one more album, they split in 1983 and Moyet went solo. Her debut album, Alf, was issued in 1984 and went to #1 in the UK thanks to the hits "Love Resurrection" and "All Cried Out." "Is This Love?" kept her momentum going, rising to #3 in the UK. In America, Moyet never really found an audience, although a 2008 reunion with Yazoo was well received when they toured there.
• Alison Moyet wrote "Is This Love?" with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, but they kept it incognito by crediting Stewart as "Jean Guiot" because he didn't want to run into problems with his publisher or label - Eurythmics were set to release their album Eurythmics around this time.
  
  It was the producer Jimmy Iovine, who was friends with Stewart and was working with Moyet, who paired them up. Moyet, who is English, was in Los Angeles working on her second album, Raindancing, and needed another song. Stewart (also English) was in LA as well, so Iovine called him up and arranged a writing session for them.
  
  "Dave was a very intersting chap. A lot of energy. Very vibrant," Moyet said on the Moyet Moments podcast. "He got out his guitar, we sat together and knocked around some chords. Then we came together on a melody and I went off and wrote a lyric. It was as simple as that."
• Moyet hasn't copped to any specific inspiration for this song, which was typical of her songwriting the '80s when her lyrics usually weren't personal, written more for singability. Later on, her lyrics got more personal.
• Moyet kept the secret that "Jean Guiot" was really Dave Stewart, but Stewart didn't. Moyet found this out when she sat down for an interview and the journalist told her that he knew because Stewart told him.
• The music video, directed by Nick Morris, was filmed on December 6 and 7, 1986 when she played two shows at The Coliseum in Cornwall, England. The video mixes performance footage with shots of Moyet and her band offstage. The idea was to show her fun, lively personality, which she couldn't do in videos where she had to act a role, like the sullen, ignored woman in "Invisible."
  
  Nick Morris did something similar in the video for "The Final Countdown" by Europe.
• Dave Stewart has a track record of writing hits with talented female singers. There's his Eurythmics partner Annie Lennox, of course, but he also wrote No Doubt's "Underneath It All" with Gwen Stefani and has also teamed with Joss Stone, Sinéad O'Connor and Stevie Nicks.
• Alison Moyet described the lyrics for "Is This Love?" to The Guardian as stemming from a dark period in her life, though she tried to subvert that mood "in a very GCSE English kind of way."
  
  She said the opening lines ("In a fleeting moment of a restless day, driven to a distraction, I was captured by the game") "are a sort of mix-up of the game of love and more personal stuff going on in my life."