Last year, Jon Bon Jovi decided to name his band’s new album “2020.” Then 2020 rolled in with fires and floods, bloodshed, riots and a global pandemic.
“We went to Nashville in March of ’19 with a collection of songs and I said to the band, ‘I think I want to call the album ‘2020,’” Bon Jovi told the Herald. “They all thought, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s cute.’ And I thought, ‘This will be a great little bumper sticker and a T-shirt and, if nothing else, we’ll have some fun with it in an election year.’”
But the songs he thought were the album were really just the first batch. As this year unfolded, Bon Jovi got smacked with the pain and discord of our modern moment and sat down to write again. The first new song came with “Do What You Can,” a tight, rock ’n’ roll anthem the COVID-19 crisis inspired by days spent last spring washing dishes at his family’s JBJ Soul Kitchen, a non-profit community restaurant in New Jersey.
“That’s when ‘2020’ really took focus for me as an album title,” he said. “If I was going to give you a topical record, how could I not address what we were living, which was COVID. This was the third week of March and so I sat down and wrote what became ‘Do What You Can.’”
While never as overtly political as New Jersey’s other rock hero, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi added bits of social consciousness to a few of his early hits (see “Living on a Prayer,” “Runaway”). But nothing he did in the past compares to the tragedies he chronicles on “2020.” Bon Jovi penned many of the songs before this year, but sadly they remain right for what we are going through: He covers veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (“Unbroken”), hatred of one another fostered by politics (“Blood in the Water”), and mass shootings that happen so quickly no one can grieve before the next one hits the news cycle (“Lower the Flag”).
The most direct, hopeless and dramatic song is the most recent. “American Reckoning,” about the killing of George Floyd, sounds more like something off Springsteen’s “Nebraska” than “Slippery When Wet” with Bon Jovi asking, “When did a judge and a jury become a badge and a knee?”
“It’s nothing more than me bearing witness to history,” he said. “I just want to relate to (listeners) that this is what’s happening.”
Bon Jovi’s new material is missing the joy of “You Give Love a Bad Name” but it includes a wise and sober adult outlook.
“(As a 25-year-old) Of course, I’m writing ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and ‘Wanted Dead or Alive,’” he said. “Our upbringing, our time in the world, the place where we were born didn’t lead us to write all that deep a song. … Now I’m 58 years old. I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve been around the world quite a few times. At this point in my life, forget about career, of course I’m going to approach things differently. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have lived up to what I hoped to grow up to be.”
The singer has seen a million faces and rocked them all. He’s also helped run a foundation with wife Dorothea working to end hunger and homelessness while raising four children through some dark times. And yet he has hope, and it comes from his kids’ generation.
“High school kids were born out of 9/11 and graduated during a pandemic,” he said. “They are sick and tired of hearing about color differences, religious and sexual differences. My hope and prayer is that this is the generation that says enough.”
