What's behind the Bon Jovi songs

ALL ABOUT LOVIN' YOU
This is the classic Bon Jovi love song. It's simple and endearing in its message. In the wake of the events of September 11th, many people rediscovered what was truly important in life. And appreciating the love of another has always been at the top of that list... but many people were reminded. This song puts priorities where they belong.


ALL I WANT IS EVERYTHING
"With this song I intended to deal with the apathetic attitude of the so-called Generation X. I am not saying that everyone can get himself a house with a swimming pool and some expensive sportcars, but you can always strive after it. You should never start with telling yourself:'I'm not going to be able to do this'. And never let anyone else tell you that you won't make it, damn-it! Always try to strive after a certain goal, is the message that Bon Jovi wants to give you through this song. I admit, not very in depth, but certainly sincere". Jon Bon Jovi


ALWAYS
"I wrote this one in a Norwegian hotel for a movie called "Romeo's bleeding". I recorded the first version of Always with Richie playing guitar, David on the piano and Pino Paladino played bass. But when I saw a preview of the movie, I decided to keep the song for me, I recorded this one with the whole band, and because it didn't fit the new album project, I decided to put Always into the greatest hits" Jon Bon Jovi


BAD MEDICINE
"I remember with that one, Desmond Child is a co-writer on that one, and what happened was, we had that song written, we rehearsed it, we demood it, it was ready to go. And he came in and recommended the idea for the chords to 'Thats what u get for falling in love', that part right. And he says 'what do u think about adding this as a b section to what is supposed u guys have'. And i said 'no', and he 'why not?' and i said, 'we know it's a number one song, and we're gonna end up giving u a piece of it' But we did it for the sake of the song , so we gave him a piece of the action on it." Jon Bon Jovi


BED OF ROSES
"I wrote Bed Of Roses in an hotelroom, it was during the time of the young guns record and the ktf album, and I was in LA, working on an album, a nova record. I was sitting in a hotel, and asked Paul Korzilius, who was our road manager at that time, to see if there's this wedding that's going on, if they'd bring up the piano to my room when they were done. And I went out that night, and got way into trouble. The next day I was determined to do some writing, and instead of laying the pencil down, which is what u do 99 out of a 100 times, I actually wrote down the lyric 'trying to capture that moment, but this moment i don't know', and the truth of that matter is that I was incredibly hungover. I wrote that verse and finally stoped playing. I played about a dozen songs for this guy, who helped me do the Young Guns record, as well as a bunch of other records I did. The 13th thing I played for him were those verses, and he said 'u got a couple of good ones here, but u gotta pull that song out of u .. u gotta finish that one'. He made me go home and write that one, and of course I'm really glad I went home and forced myself to write that one, cause it was such a big hit. It was a very personal song, a lot of problems were exposed in that." Jon Bon Jovi


BITTER WINE
"A Stones-like ballad...like 'Wild Horses'. A bonustrack." Jon Bon Jovi


BLAZE OF GLORY
"When I had to play it live at the Academy Awards, the best thing to do was to get the band together again. So everybody came to the academy awards with me to appear on the show. I enjoyed it, it was a fun gig." Jon Bon Jovi


BOUNCE
This song is a declaration of strength and defiance. Initially, it had referred to the city of New York, and the United States as a whole, but also to the band's perseverance over a twenty year career. However, the song, as well as the album title, is open to interpretation by the listener. Whatever it is that you believe in, stick to it. Don't let others veer you off your chosen path. Determination. Gumption. Spirit. These prevail.


CAPTAIN CRASH AND THE BEAUTY QUEEN FROM MARS
"Richie came over to Rome while I was shooting U-571, to write, so we got together one day. I said 'I've got a strange one here, and it's called Captain Crash And The Beauty Queen From Mars'. And I said, Let's think of this guy, he said yea.., I said think of this guy, he said, I get it. 'Now let's make them more Ziggy stardust, u know, and have this fictional story of these 2 screw ups who think that they are on the cover of times newsweek and rollingstone all in the same week. And really they can't get out of their own way.' But they are enduring characters, so they've been completely fictionalised mind you, but also somebody that u would like to be." Jon Bon Jovi


DAMNED
"I can't wait until we get to play this live sometime. 'Damned' we recorded with the original brass section of the Asbury Jukes. Hey, this way I turn out to be a Juke afterall !". Jon Bon Jovi


DRY COUNTY
"I was in a place somewhere in New Mexico. I was thirsty. I went into a service area and I met an old man that asked me to cross the border with him and to go play with darts. I did that all the night. The morning after I wrote Dry County" Jon Bon Jovi


EVERYDAY
EVERYDAY is the first single from the bounce album and reinforces the need to live each day to its fullest. The lyrics acknowledge the harshness of life but encourage listeners to brush themselves off, get back up on their feet and get on with life. The video for EVERYDAY reinforces this global message (as well as the international superstar status of BON JOVI) by setting the band's performance at the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico. The massive radio antennas in the background seemingly transmit the band's performance to locations around the world and we witness people from all corners of the planet watching this broadcast. The band's performance was filmed in July and then two additional film crews left for locations across the globe (they include London, Rome, Sarajevo, Moscow, Jerusalem, Kenya, Australia, Bangkok, India, Tokyo and New York City) in order to capture real footage of people around the world for the video.


HEARTS BREAKING EVEN
" I wrote it together with Desmond Child, when Richie was out of town. Great guy, our Rich. Comes up to me and just tells me: 'I don't have time right now, I have to catch my plane. I have a date with Heather Locklear". So I answered something like 'Have Fun'. And the moment he's back there's another song finished: 'Hearts Breaking Even'." Jon Bon Jovi


HOOK ME UP
This is a great rock song that has a deeper message when one understands the lyrics within the proper context. The song was inspired by a newspaper article about a young Palestinean man in occupied territory, trying desperately to make contact with people via an old, beat-up ham radio. He was trapped in a small corner of the world, amidst horrible events and all he longed for was communication, a connection with the outside world and other people. With that situation in mind, the song was written from the young man's perspective, as if in a bunker, desperate for contact with others.


I BELIEVE
"A moment of coming to my senses. I walk through 57th street in Manhattan and carelessly step over a guy that's laying on the side-walk. Just like that, as if it's the most normal thing in the world. But why do we do that? Why do I do that? And why is it not me laying there? Anyhow, a song that makes you think." Jon Bon Jovi


IF THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES
"We knew from the start that the chords and couplets were allright. But we just couldn't get the chorus to work. Until suddenly, just before finishing up the album, it was there." Jon Bon Jovi * "It's a typical Bon Jovi song in the vein of I'll be there for you. Musically it was greatly influenced by Richie. He's real fond of it." Jon Bon Jovi


I GOT THE GIRL
"You initially hear this song, and good or bad, well jon bon jovi got the girl.. isn't that great.. But what u find out in the last lyric of the song 'She always will be a 5 year old princess to me', and that's about my daugter. I've never written a song about my kids before, nor have i ever wanted to, I don't know what influenced it, other then I spit it out one day, and i was really fond of the lyric, and it's a rock song, it's very up tempo, with the surprise in the last line." Jon Bon Jovi


I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU
"This song belongs to the magic moments of Slippery When Wet, we were leaving our parents houses to go live in our own houses. This happened only after Slippery because we didn't make much money with the first two albums" Jon Bon Jovi


IN AND OUT OF LOVE
"In And Out Of Love, that's really truly what it is, I mean it's just a goofy little song I wrote in early 1985 after our first tour. I mean, what an amasing experience we just had... we toured the world.
I wrote that in my parents house, i remember sitting on the steps, with the stereo blasting in my room, the tv downstairs on, and nobody home. I sat on the steps and wrote that one, just laughing about 1984 - I mean what an expereince, it was amasing." Jon bon Jovi

IT"S JUST ME
That's been 17 years now. Dorothea was going out with another guy from our high school at the time, but he must have not been around then. It was mid-summer, in the broad daylight. We went down to the beach, and I covered us up with a blanket. And then we did it for the first time. We've been together ever since. The whole song is a little thank you to my wife. For sure she didn't have it easy with me all the time."


IT'S MY LIFE
"We started playing around, I came up with this title IML, and it was really just the animals, and we wrote that big old authentic chorus." Jon Bon Jovi


JOEY
JOEY takes us on a journey through the life of one character who befriends a simple-minded young man. With an intentional tip of the hat to Elton John's "Levon", JOEY allows Jon to climb into another's shoes and tell a story through that character's perspective. A window into one person's world told through song.

JUST OLDER
"The lyrics says one simple thing in the chorus: 'I like the bed i'm sleeping in, just like me it's broking in, it's not old, just older. Like a favorite pair of old torn jeans, this skin i'm in is alright with me, It's not old, just older'. And that sums it up. When i sang this, my chest was out, my backbone was straight, and i was very exciting singing it, and I saw that the audience felt that. Now regardless if u are 16, u think u are older then when u're 12, when u are 38, u think u are older than when u were 25, or when u are 50 u think u are older than when u were 35. So it's a question of feeling experience because of the song." Jon Bon Jovi


KEEP THE FAITH
"In KTF, we sat down to rewrite a social conscious lyric with sympathy for the devil. U know.. and to tell u the truth, it was really the animals, and... it was just lets go really back to the things we love. Who wish they didn't write Sympathy For The Devil. And those great animal classics, which we are trying to rip off for years
That song needed to be said. There was a real risk writing a song like that, considering the album title, and a single, etc.. it's such a statement to make, when people wanted us to write bad medicine again, but that wasn't what we wanted to do. It was important to say something with keep the faith, and we did." Jon Bon Jovi


LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME
"We were in the studio, recording in Jersey, and it was real quick because we wrote it in Vancouver in the sudio, which was a little rare for us to go into the studio and write a song. We've done that on a couple, but not to any with that great extend. Richie had a riff and i came up with a title, and one thing lead to another. It was a quick song to write, and it was funny cuz again I remember sitting there with curt marvis who done a lot of our videos and he said 'this songs is gonna be a big hit'. And i was like 'look, I wanna bet u anything u want, this is just a silly rock song,and i sorta like it, but not a big deal . Next thing u knew people liked it live and it was a big single. It was a surprise." Jon Bon Jovi


(IT'S HARD) LETTING YOU GO
" I made this for the movie I can been seen in soon, 'Moonlight and Valentino', and it will suprise the fans. This really isn't a Bon Jovi song. You just hear me, Richie, and some electronic equipment. I play the keyboards in this song and did the singing live. It really was a gift for the producers of 'Moonlight and Valentino', recorded on a tape. A sort of 'thank you' for letting me play in the movie. And promptly the used it as a soundtrack. And now I put it onto this album too. It's funny really, originally only a few people would have heard this song. And now, all of a sudden, it's both movie-music and a real album-track. But I'm happy with it anyhow". "I had the script, I know the story well, but I didn't want to write a song for the movie. But I couldn't help myself. I wrote it as a gift to one of the producers who was so kind to me. I gave her the cassette and she loved it. So I recorded it." Jon Bon Jovi


LEVON
"Every once in a while, I hear a song that I wish I had written. The first time I heard "Levon", I knew it was one of those songs." Jon Bon Jovi


LIE TO ME
"And there's Tom and Gina again, known because of my big hit 'Livin' On A Prayer". They are having some problems with their relationship and at one point one of the two says: 'If you can't tell me you love me, lie to me!' And I didn't make that line up!" Jon Bon Jovi * "It's the kind of song you get a charge out of playing live every night" Jon Bon Jovi


LIVIN' ON A PRAYER
"I knew that Livin'on a prayer was a great song but I didn't expect that people would like this one. Fortunately things have gone in a different way" Jon Bon Jovi "It's a great song, it has a nice groove, and the lyrics are amazing. When we say "'Cause it doesn't make a difference if we make it or not, we've got each other and that's a lot....", these are words that people have said at least one time in their life" Richie Sambora


LONELY AT THE TOP
The song was written after Kurt Cobain's suicide. He left a small daugher, Frances Bean, behind. The song begins, "Tell Franny, I'm sorry she never got to know her dad"...


LOVE ME BACK TO LIFE
The band worked incredibly hard these past few years... sometimes to the point of exhaustion. And that's a feeling everyone can relate to. When you're world-weary, you need someone or something to breathe the life back into you and allow you to appreciate the world again. LOVE ME BACK TO LIFE is a plea for that nurturing.


MISUNDERSTOOD
MISUNDERSTOOD is a song for every guy who's said the wrong thing (or failed to say the right thing) and had to face up to the fact. Written upon his return home from a long stretch of time away on location , Jon acknowledged there were portions of his personal life he'd neglected and wrote this song as a mea culpa. The intentions are always good, but the delivery sometimes poor. This is the everyman's song Ð it's for every guy who has been in the doghouse.
Jon noticed that in current popular music, there existed a dearth of real story-telling. The singer/songwriter was as popular as ever but the epic stories told by Billy Joel or Elton John through song were missing. Jon set out to write songs in that vein.


MY GUITAR LIES BLEEDING IN MY ARMS
" A lesson a learned during the struggle that preceded the making of 'Bed of Roses': Never throw you guitar in a corner when you can't make it work, but keep on trying, keep on trying. Do you know that scene from 'Tommy', where he walks into a room and a sees all these posters of himself? I had a dream like that too. I walk in to a room and I see my head all over the walls. And all the posters growl: 'Come on Jon, write another song. Come on, you remember how to do it don't you?'. That is the shit I always have to deal with. The constant fear that you dry out creatively. I always have those thoughts wandering around in my mind. Will I ever write a good song again? Can I still do it? Will I still enjoy doing it? In 'Guitar lies bleeding' I write all those frustrations off of me. And that feels great, you can take my word for it!" Jon Bon Jovi


NEVER SAY GOODBYE
"We wrote this one initially for trash metal band Panthera, but we turned this one in a ballad" Richie Sambora


NEXT 100 YEARS
"The Japanese market called and asked do we have a song that J friends, a boyband in Japan could record, and had a lyrical message that would support future generations even, and we said 'u know, as a matter of fact, we do'. So we send them the original demo, these guys recorded it, and they sold somewhere close to 800 000 - 900 000 singles already. and was our first Japanese nr 1 song on the domestic charts, in all these hit's we've had in Japan, it was the 1st domestic number 1 single." Jon Bon Jovi


OPEN ALL NIGHT
This song has its origin in the acting world. Jon Bon Jovi appeared on Ally McBeal for nine episodes as the character Victor Morrison, a plumber/babysitter/jack-of-all-trades at the home of the title character. While the storyline, especially the romance, took a very long time to evolve onscreen, Jon admitted that, had it been real life, he would never have allowed it to take so long Ð it would have happened or he would have moved on. The song OPEN ALL NIGHT is, in essence, Victor's dialogue with Ally, had Jon written the teleplay.


RUNAWAY
" I wrote this one in New York, it's a great place to work, but I had the desire to go home to my parents" Jon Bon Jovi


SAY IT ISN'T SO
"When people hear it now, they are very surprised that I have written a song like this, you know, both in lyrical content as in musical value. But it's different and again has a, I think, rather possitive chorus in that What it says lyricly is, say it isn't so, tell me it isn't true.. because u still have to be able to dream. U have to be able to believe in roll models, hero's or santa claus. Once u forget those dreams, it becomes a boring life." Jon Bon Jovi


SAVE THE WORLD
"Jerry Bruckheimer send me the the script of Armageddon and asked me to write a song for that soundtrack and perhaps for the movie, and when i read the script, I immediately knew that the character Ben Afleck was playing, leaving Liv tyler to go and save the world, finding out that he was in love with liv tylers character and bruce willis being her dad in the film, was going to whoop his ass for it. Being the wild boy in the film, he was the story to me, this was what I was gonna write about. It was really obvious to me and I wrote the song, and I liked the song very much. Put it away, because i found out they had their, with aerosmith doing their song. So I changed the lyrics to make it a bit more personal, but the basis of it comes from the script of Armageddon." Jon Bon Jovi


SHE'S A MYSTERY
"She's A Mystery I wrote, believe it or not, at a songwriters retreat, I was invited to the south of France at what was truly a castle in the middle of nowhere. And it became one of the truly great experiences of my life, because all u could talk about was songwriting. And u would sit in a room with 2 other people and develop a song, not for you, not for them, ..for the wind, just to see what would happen. And you were forced to demo that song that day. So it was almost like a test, could you or could you not. I got up really early at dawn, picked up my guitar, started playing, came up with that title and started writing. So when I walked inthere that day, we knocked it out in 10 minutes. But the song turned out that well, that it actually made the bands record, which is not like us to do anything like that." Jon Bon Jovi

SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN
"This was the toughest job of all. We rewrote this song no less than 10 times! The last time on request of John Kalodner, one of the Columbia Records big-shots. He just said: "Put some accordion in there. And a twelve-string guitar" so we did that immediately, ha ha. Originally we ment this song to be in the seventies-legend T-Rex tradition, but now it sounds so unique that there is no trace of any of that influence left. Except of the influence of Kalodner that is. I had originally named the song "I've been Lovin' you too long to turn back now'" but John didn't like that at all. So it became 'Somethin' for the pain'. But other than that nothing but good about John!" Jon Bon Jovi


SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN
"The first song I wrote for this album. It deals with my state of mind at the end of our last tour. I needed something to believe in. I felt good, but I did have to sort things out for myself". Jon Bon Jovi


THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME
"If I were to write record credits on the album sleeve, it would've said Thank You For Loving Me, thank you to Brad Pitt, so that would've started a 100 rumors. But the truth is, a lot of times, I get stories from movies, in this case I went to see the movie Meet Joe Black. And brad is holding this girl at the end of the movie and says 'thank you for loving me'. And I was like 'Gotta go!'. I ran home, wrote that chorus, and much like Always or Bed Of Roses, or a lot of the hit ballads we had over the years, I've always written them by myself. Because they are rather easy for me to do. I saw the outline in that movie, this was something I could knock out in 10 minutes." Jon Bon Jovi


THE DISTANCE
this song is written in a cinematic style. The music serves as a score to the lyrics, which begins as an establishing shot and the "camera" draws closer into the story as the song progresses. The message reiterates the passion one feels when there is a goal in sight and the determination shown when striving to reach that goal.


THE RIGHT SIDE OF WRONG
This is a modern-day Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid... good souls involved in wrongdoing but with hearts in the right place. There is an intentional movie feeling to the song... the music and guitar solos help to drive the story and the ending is left open... Again, an intentional nod to the storytelling songwriters that have inspired the band.


THESE DAYS
"Well, that's funny. Now I think about it, for a large part this album deals a lot with my past. I used to always want to be one of the Asbury Jukes, after-all my dearest possesion is a blue satin Jukes-jacket from 1977. That Rhythm and Blues influence you can clearly hear in the first two songs of These Days. In the titletrack I sort of play with people from the past. At one moment I sing 'Jimmy Shoes busted both his legs'. Jimmy Shoes is the nick-name of Jimmy Lovine, the big-boss of Interscope Records, but in my song he's just a little boy. A little boy that breaks both of his little legs. Ha ha!" Jon Bon Jovi * "It's the one that I'm most excited about playing live, because of the lyrical content, the emotion of the song, and what it says." Jon Bon Jovi


THIS AIN'T A LOVESONG
"Just another good rhythm&blues song without any psychological depth. It's about broken hearts, you know. A better singer than Jon Bon Jovi could have made it into something of a huge magnitude. Imagine if Otis Redding would have done this song...wow!" Jon Bon Jovi * "The first line is a partial reference to Bed of Roses, it's a nice picture that will remind people of that." Jon Bon Jovi


TOKYO ROAD
"Tokyo Road was written out of respect, because we were the biggest, at the end of our 1st album and we went on tour to japan, they treated us like we were the beatles. There were people waiting for us at the airport, and getting us presents, and... and fanatic fans... So it was something we put together for them. We were just so blown away, cause here we were being reacted to like what u thought beatle mania was. But the funny part is, that when we went back at the beginning of the Fahreneit album and we took all our girlfriends with us at that time, we said 'listen, when we get thru customs here, it's gonna get really crazy. Tons of people are gonna be here, dolls made of all of us, etc... We walked out and there's nobody there, there is no reaction from anybody.... and they were like 'yeah... u guys are really big here...'. But the Japanese audience as a whole has been really good to us for a lot of years and they remained that way, which is pretty cool." Jon Bon Jovi


UNDIVIDED
The song is the most directly influenced by the events of September 11th but, rather than dwelling upon the horror, it celebrates the silver lining the black cloud of 9/11 offered us. UNVIDIDED speaks to the oneness of everyone... not just one city, or one country... but the whole world entire. No man is an island... we are all part of the greater world that is humanity. We are stronger together, than apart.


WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
"I remember in '85, we were on the road with Ratt. For some reason, at least from my memory, is that I couldn't sleep and this one day, it was like at dawn, for the first time I heard this one song on the radio. And uhm, it hit home. I remember being at richie's mothers house that afternoon. We sat down to write this song Wanted Dead Or Alive. I told him the title, and he just came up with the riff... and that was boom boom boom. We wrote that song in... very quickly. We wrote 2 songs which we finished before dinner. So we leaved the basement on dinnertime, and I had to go back to my mothers house cause we still hadn't got any money after 2 albums, or any place to live. So we had to be nice to our parents . It was an easy song to write - i guess it was so personal to us, so.. just right on." Jon Bon Jovi

"It was our experience, it was what we knew, what we did." Richie Sambora


YOU GIVE LOVE A BAD NAME
"Bad Name again, I think was fun cuz we wrote that in Richie's mothers basement. Slippery.. each album was written in eachothers houses. But that one was written there, and we got together with Desmond because we were both silly enough to think that after our 2nd album going gold, and we now had 2 golden albums, and guys like Bryan Adams were becomming successfull writing songs for other people - We wanted to do that too, we thought we have 2 golden albums, so we must be huge. We didn't really know how to go about it, so our RNA guy said, 'well there's this guy... and what u do is, u gotta get out and work those songs, u got to get them to their publishers, to their managers...' And of course we couldn't do that, cause we were in the middle of writing the Slippery album. So he said, 'It's okay, we'll get together with this guy, and this kid, Loverboy, needs a song.' Okay, so we write the song, liked it a little too much, and decided they didn't get that song." Jon Bon Jovi



YOU HAD ME FROM HELLO
The acting world and the magic of movies has had a significant impact on the songwriting of this album. YOU HAD ME FROM HELLO has obvious movie overtones. The phrase, coined by Cameron Crowe in his movie Jerry McGuire, was a beautiful sentiment. Fleshed out, the song is an ode to a committed relationship. The song honors the ability of someone to constantly see something new and beautiful in the one they love.