Sunday, December 8, 2019

Bon Jovi 2020 album preview & more

Jon Bon Jovi recently spoke with Pollstar about the upcoming album 2020, including some detail about specific songs. This part about the writing and recording of "Lower the Flag", which deals with gun violence, stood out for me:

I saw that Sunday morning, with [the] Dayton [shooting] and what had happened, and I just started strumming on the guitar, and it came and it came rather quickly over the course of maybe two days. I kept tweaking it, and I knew I had something. I was so proud of what I had but, I didn’t have a song title. I sat there and I said, “What the hell is the name of this song?” And I said, “It doesn’t really have a proper chorus,” and I was thinking of Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and telling a story. And I said, Okay well (singing) “Four dead in Ohio,” and then you go, “I guess that’s the name of this song.”  And then, when you really sit with that song, there is no second verse. (singing) “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah” ... that might be a great hook, but it’s not a verse. And when I wrote this, I was playing it for a bunch of people, Shanks was one of them. And I said, “I don’t know why Neil, who’s so poetic and prolific, didn’t write a second verse and instead went for that.” And Shanks was like, “That’s a great hook.” I go, “Well, this song isn’t about hooks, it’s about telling this story.” And then I still had no title. That’s when I put the last line repeating what the first line did, and I said, “There’s the title, ‘Lower The Flag,’” because that’s exactly what the whole thing is about.
Even that bridge was just so different for me, (singing), “If there’s something we can talk about, let’s talk about it.” And the rhythm of that melody was something that I’d written, I got it, I did it and went in the studio with it. I had everything completely finished, and I went in with (bassist) Hughie (McDonald) and [drummer] Tico [Torres], me and Shanks. And I was playing guitar, and I’m playing the guitar on the record, and Tico starts playing, and we said, “[the drum] is not helping, it’s hindering the progress of the song.” We said, this isn’t a drum song, this isn’t what this should be. And so he flew all the way to California and didn’t play on it, because we knew what we had lyrically and just wanted to tell the story
The article mentions that Jon did a lot of writing on his own, and we've already heard that "Unbroken" sounds like solo Jon, but I do hope the album sounds like a band record. But I guess most of all I hope it's good. 😉

Here's Jon performing "Unbroken" at the Rockefeller Center. He was joined on stage by men and women who have served in the military:

No word on an official release date for the album yet, or a tour, but Phil X and the Drills are touring Europe in March 2020 so presumably Bon Jovi won't be on the road then.

CBS Sunday Morning also did a nice story with Jon and Dorothea recently about their work with the JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants. They're opening a new one at Rutgers University next year.

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