Imagine having the audacity to name your album 2020. To take the year that has been the most monumental and disastrous in our lifetime and plaster it all over CDs with your face on them. Very few people could get away with it; Jon Bon Jovi might just pull it off.
Of course, that had more or less been the plan long before the year truly kicked into gear, before the pandemic ravaged the world, before an officer knelt on George Floyd’s throat for eight minutes and 46 seconds, before the sky in California turned a hellish orange due to climate change-induced wildfires.
When I met Bon Jovi, back in pre-lockdown February, when everything was at least a little bit less grim, the album had a slightly different name: Bon Jovi 2020.
“There’s a wryness, because it’s an election year, but it’s also because I have a clear vision of where the band is going, so that was the double entendre,” he tells me. His hair still has that metal puff and he’s looking absolutely stellar at 58, his decision to swerve the rock star lifestyle at a young age having paid dividends. (He has been happily married to his childhood love, Dorothea, since he was 27, and though he has watched bandmates and peers succumb to drug addiction and alcohol abuse, including his dear friend and writing partner Richie Sambora, who left the band after 30 years in 2013 after a few stints in rehab, he has never threatened to go the same way.)
But the album, which was postponed from its initial May release, and its title have changed in the months since. Two new tracks, recorded from his home studio in New Jersey, which directly address Floyd’s death and the pandemic, have been added. Alongside songs that address gun violence and Donald Trump’s tumultuous term as president, they paint a picture of a nation in turmoil.
“America’s on fire,” he sings in “American Reckoning”, which was released in July. It compounds a feeling that was present on the original version of the album I heard at the beginning of the year, in songs such as “Lower The Flag”, which name-checks 13 mass shootings, that the singer – a beacon of fist-pumping American optimism for the best part of 40 years – is worried for the future of his country.
“I am very concerned because there’s such an extreme divide that it’s almost as if the nation is saying you’re with me or you’re against me,” he says. “I like to think I was taking the position throughout the record of saying, ‘Let’s have a conversation.’ Consider the song ‘Lower The Flag’. A gun rights advocate is going to say, ‘This is my gun, you can’t take it away, our constitution says so.’ The argument would be common sense laws. This isn’t a conversation about that. The song says, ‘If there’s something we can talk about, let’s talk about it.’ So all I’m saying in the song is if this were to happen to your family member how would you feel?”
The song features the repetition of a striking image: someone sent out to lower the American flag after reports of yet another shooting has come in. “Word just came from upstate, Joe / Lower the flag again.” With so many shootings each year, it might be easier, one might suggest, to leave the flag down altogether. Is the song a comment on patriotism? Bon Jovi bristles.
“No, I don’t want you to assume... Don’t think for me. I’m not allowing you to write that in your magazine because you’re wrong. Don’t do that, because it is not a reflection on patriotism, nor is anything on this record flag-waving. Neither.”
I tweak my question. Does he feel patriotic?
“I feel more a citizen of the world having travelled it as much as I have for as long as I have,” he says. “I’m heartbroken by the divide and wish that we lived in more of a ‘we’ society than a ‘me’ society. In the same breath, I understand why Donald Trump was elected, because of the voice of the voiceless that were overlooked that wanted to be heard and certainly deserved to be heard, so they have spoken up, and if they choose to elect that president again it will be the voice of the people, granted it’s a true and fair election. So I’m neither overtly patriotic nor certainly not unpatriotic. I love my nation like everyone loves theirs, but I’m aware of the other ones too.”
Bon Jovi is a Democrat, having supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He recently performed at a benefit for Joe Biden held by New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, so if it wasn’t already clear which horse he’s backing this year, it is now. And yet, he has fans on both sides of the divide, so he is careful not to preach.
“I never used the stage to discuss my political beliefs, because even my stage is divided, let alone my audience. So that is not my position. And I’m not here to preach my view of the world. Whether I’m at a rally offstage is my business, I’m just another citizen with that right.”
But he does take direct aim at Donald Trump on his song “Blood In The Water”. “A storm is coming / Let me be clear / Your days are numbered,” he sings.
“‘Blood In The Water’ is directed at the administration, for sure. It starts off with ‘A storm is coming’ – Stormi Daniels. ‘Your shadow sold your secrets and he’s about to do some time’ – Michael Cohen. That’s what this was all written about. Now there’s blood in the water, a year later, or two months ago, you could say that it was the impeachment.”
The rock star has a storied history with Donald Trump. In 2018 it was reported that the American president schemed to keep Bon Jovi from buying the American football team Buffalo Bills in 2014. Allegedly Trump had also been interested in buying the Bills, but he knew he would be unable to outbid Bon Jovi and his Toronto-based partners, so he hired Republican operative Michael Caputo, and they incited a grassroots campaign to turn the people of Buffalo against him.
A group of activists called “12th Man Thunder” sprung up and began establishing “Bon Jovi-free zones” in the city, with Caputo pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Radio DJs in the city refused to play his songs on air.
A large part of the scheme involved convincing the fans that Bon Jovi and his partners intended to move the team to Canada, which Bon Jovi strenuously denies. “I can tell you, I swear to you on a stack of Bibles, because I had to have this hardy conversation with the two partners: ‘We’re not gonna get this unless we keep this here,’” he says, recalling the incident, which he calls “one of the biggest disappointments” of his life. “We never saw it coming. I was calling the town councilman, telling him, ‘I’m moving to Buffalo, New York!’”
It worked, kind of. Bon Jovi’s group didn’t get the team, but neither did Trump. Terry Pegula, a local businessman who owned Buffalo’s ice hockey team, won in a sealed bid.
“We showed up with a billion three, sitting there with a cheque. And we could have easily bought it at any price. We didn’t get to get back in the room. [Pegula] said, ‘What do I have to do to not leave this table without owning the team?’”
It still smarts. “I won’t ever go back to the city of Buffalo,” he says. “You will never see my face in Buffalo ever. I have knocked it off the map.”
Ending our conversation on a more positive note, I ask how did he end up, after finding fame through music at a young age, so... sane?
“I remember when we were young and Slippery When Wet was our Thriller or Like A Virgin, right? I remember us saying we haven’t changed. But everyone around us had. Even our parents looked at us for answers at that point, because we’d become famous and we were like, ‘That’s fucking weird.’
“What burned us out after the New Jersey album [in 1988] was having back-to-back huge albums and doing 240 show tours. Although, in retrospect, I don’t blame the managers, agents and lawyers and stuff that kept us working, because it’s been repeated by every successful band at that point in your career. You either fall backwards and it’s over or you figure it out and you go forward. We found help after New Jersey and a couple of years off to realise that it wasn’t us, it was it. We regrouped and we did keep the faith and we run on. Guns N’ Roses took 25 years to have another record, right? They went back and fell off the precipice and we went forward.”
All it took was for him to dip one toe in the ocean of excess and he knew immediately it wasn’t for him.
“When I dabbled with having a house in Malibu, California, I said, ‘We gotta go. This ain’t for me.’ It was all around me. And now either those people are dead or divorced, or drug addicts, mental institutions or all kinds of stories, you know? This ain’t for me, it’s gotta go.”
It’s this kind of level-headedness that has carried Jon Bon Jovi through his long, unimpeachable career and makes him a voice worth listening to even still in 2020. His social-distancing ballad, “Do What You Can”, written during lockdown in March, is skin-crawlingly earnest (“Although I’ll keep my social distance, what this world needs is a hug”; “Ain’t it time we loved a stranger? They’re just a friend you ain’t met yet”), but he, more than most, has earned the right to send a shiver or two down the spines of his devoted public. And in a time of worldwide trauma, a bit of Bon Jovi-brand optimism goes a long way.
2020 by Bon Jovi is out now.
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