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Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Music

Bon Jovi – This Is Love, This Is Life – A classic song waiting to be discovered

This Is Love, This is Life

When I mention Bon Jovi to someone these are the answers I get back from people?

  1. They haven’t written anything good since New Jersey.
  2. They don’t care about their fans at all, it’s all about money.
  3. They don’t even know who their fans are anymore.
  4. Fake and a bunch of posers.
  5. The best band ever.
  6. They wrote the soundtrack of the eighties.

They are one of those bands that polarise people.  Guys hate to admit that they like them.

The first point is interesting.  To me Bon Jovi have written a lot of good songs since New Jersey and this is the reason for this post.

I already covered That’s The Water Made Me from What About Now in a previous post.

The next song I want to get out there is from their 2010 Greatest Hits Album.  The problem with this song is that it is on Disc 2 of the Ultimate Edition and it is the second last song.   For those who don’t know, say hello to THIS IS LOVE, THIS IS LIFE.

YouTube – This Is Love, This Is Life

These days what’s left of me ain’t no Prince Charming
And my Cinderella feels like she stayed at the dance too long
We ain’t got much but what we got is all that matters
We’re pickin’ up the pieces, tryin’ to put ‘em back where they belong

It’s nothing original, and you can say that is another Livin On A Prayer, but that is what works for this song.  Coming out post GFC, this is the song they should have had on Circle.  This is the one that mattered.  A lot of people didn’t have much left post GFC.  Many people where picking up the pieces again and trying to rebuild their lives.   Everybody was affected by the GFC.  It also has a talk box like Living On A Prayer and It’s My Life.  Maybe that is why they decided to bury the song in a Greatest Hits Ultimate Edition.  Lucky for them I was a fan and I found it.  Now I want to bring it to the masses.  I checked my IPod, and this song has been played by my family 4203 times since October 2010.  Do the math on that one?  It’s in constant rotation at my place.

Ohh, it’s gonna be alright
This is love, this is life
When times get tough we’re still worth the fight
This is love, this is life
The road here’s paved with the broken hearted
We gotta finish what we started
Ohhh, better hold on tight
This is love, this is life

The chords in the chorus are the same as Living On A Prayer and It’s My Life, just in a different key.  This is what people wanted to hear post GFC.  This is what they wanted their heroes in music to tell them.  It’s going to be alright.  We will tough it out.  We will keep the fight alive and we will rebuild what we started.

These days it seems like there’s three sides to every story
There’s yours, mine, lately there’s the cold hard truth
Who cares who’s wrong or right when we turn out the lights?
We’ll find forgiveness when we’re in each other’s arms tonight
It ain’t pretty but somehow we always make it through

The world was going through a dark period and people where turning on each other.  We had all become consumed with money and possessions.  I can’t even recall how many arguments my wife and I had over money.  Plus we were building a house during the GFC and even though we had stable and secure jobs with great incomes the banks where tightening their belts, which meant more credit cards and personal loans were taken out to get the project finished.   How ridiculous was that?  The banks wouldn’t fund me a home loan, but they had no troubles giving me credit cards and personal loans.  What a corrupt system?  It wasn’t pretty but we made it through.

I read somewhere that the bonus tracks on the Greatest Hits album where written during The Circle writing session.  Jon Bon Jovi has a history of making incorrect songs selections for albums, and this is another one.  This song should have been the leadoff single from The Circle.  Let’s show Bon Jovi that this song still matters and bring it to the masses.   They only played it once live.  It needs to be a staple of the set list.  It is a Bon Jovi classic waiting to be discovered.

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Bon Jovi – What About It’s Over

Just finished listening to Bon Jovi’s new album What About Now (deluxe edition).

Lucky I purchased the deluxe addition as the best song on the album is Every Road Leads Home to You, the Sambora penned track from his equally forgettable solo album, Aftermath of The Lowdown.

The next song worth any note is That’s What the Water Made Me. So this is what happens, when 50 year old rockers try to chase the money from the twenty something’s.  Instead of writing for their hard core audience, they are focusing on a different market.

Bon Jovi doesn’t even know who their audience is anymore.  They have lost complete touch with them.  In a world where one to one connections is the new normal (take a leaf out of Nikki Sixx’s twittering and Facebook offerings), Bon Jovi is entrenched in the old paradigm.  Spend months creating an album for an audience they don’t even know. I am not a hater.

I am a big Bon Jovi fan.  I am displeased with this effort.  Hell, the best song they have written in the last 5 years is This is Love, This Is Life from the Greatest Hits CD.  You would only hear this song if you purchased the deluxe edition that had disc 2 and another two bonus songs on that.  The carbon copied Someday I’ll Be A Saturday Night morphed into The More Things Change is also a stand out.

Yeah I know Jovi sell shows out on a regular basis, but you tell me a fan that goes to the show to hear the new songs and I will call them a liar.  A set list of their most recent show (via setlist.fm) on March 10 shows only 3 songs played from the new album (Because We Can, Amen and That’s What The Water Made Me).  That is two too many.

The only tune that they should be pushing is That’s The Water Made Me.

Cause devils in heaven
There’s angels in hell

You don’t know these days, who is righteous or not.  We live in a world of fakes, a world of avatars.  Where people who think they have 1000 Facebook friends are cool, where people pay $800 for a meet and greet just to say they did.  The lines between good and evil are blurred these days.  

Love is like fingerprints It don’t wash away

No one forgets their first love or their greatest love.  It stays forever with them.  Look at the band Hinder.  They have made a career singing about the one that got away. 

That’s what the water made me That’s who I am and what I’ll be

This is it.  We can’t change how we are made, how we have grown up and what we believe in.  Of course we can adapt to situations and sometimes we can fake a different personality but in the end, we will fall back to how we were made and what we are.  Look at how the 80’s glam bands thought they had to go all Industrial or grunge like to keep an audience, further alienating their fan base, until the said Fuck that and returned to their roots. 

This world, it’s cracked and crazy
Say one of your pretty prayers for me
No roles in the garden? Or Wishing well?

Life is no Garden of Eden.  It never was and it never will be.  We have copyright granted monopolies fighting hard to control the internet.  We have people working 12 hour days just to see all of their moneys go to the mortgage, to the utilities, to basic survival needs.   At night, we might feel better saying a pretty prayer, but that is all it is.  The World is cracked and Crazy. 

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