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anyone else’s. It is what it is.
    TICO: It’s magic. It starts from a creative process. Jon and Richie work with a little tape player and some guitars to make a song that works for all of us. If you had a couple of different guys in the band, it would sound totally different. It wouldn’t, it couldn’t be the same song.
    JON: You can craft a song. But I’ve found that whenever we crafted a song, those songs didn’t work. I’m not that good a craftsman to make it work so it’s got to come from a real place.
    It’s not a conscious effort to write a hit song. It’s a conscious effort to write a great song and if a “Livin’ On A Prayer” or “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” or “It’s My Life” is born, you go, “I want the world to know that we’ve just knocked one out of the park!”
    Sure, “Bad Medicine” sounds cute and “You Give Love A Bad Name” is tongue-in-cheek. You remember the lyric though, right?
    When I was twenty-five, “Bad Name” was the shit. We were in the mall. We had that hair and those clothes. It was real. That was us, then. But I couldn’t do that today. I don’t think we could sit down to write “You Give Love A Bad Name” again. It would be crafting and it wouldn’t resonate.
    TICO: You can’t manufacture. If you manufacture anything that has to do with creativity—art, music, anything—it won’t work. It will be transparent. It won’t be felt.
    JON: It’s too important that we continue to write songs that move people. I’m not going to follow whatever the trend happens to be at the moment. I have to be true to myself.
    We have to be true to ourselves as songwriters and true to what Bon Jovi is about.

     
Sanctuary Sound II, Middletown, NJ, April 2009.
Phil Griffin (2009)
     

     
Sanctuary Sound II, Middletown, NJ, April 2009.
Phil Griffin (2009)
     
    RICHIE: When it comes down to Jon and I writing a song, it’s pure. We’re not thinking about business. We’ve written specific songs earlier in our careers saying, “This is going to work in an arena” or “This will work in a stadium.” They were specifically made to get the crowd ready, get everybody’s dander up, and deliver the knockout punch.
    For the most part, Jon and I have remained the same people and our friendship has grown tighter over the years. Anytime you write songs together, everybody’s got their own individual experience and idea of what the song is about. They are often different for Jon and me but we meet in the middle on things. Different songs mean different things to him.
    When I’m up onstage singing, sometimes I’m really thinking about my dad. Certain lyrics turn out to mean something different over time. Some stuff you wrote in 1990, it comes back around when you are performing it now. Life boomerangs and fits into those lyrical strands we’d written about years before. It’s like looking at your life through a rearview mirror. It becomes clearer as you get older.
    Our lyrics speak to how people really live, what they feel. Those are our feelings but when we write a song, we write a lyric people connect with naturally.
    JON: From a songwriting point of view, we grew up after the New Jersey album. By then, I had a hell of a lot more to say and we were more mature.
    DAVID: Our songs don’t preach. We’re not hitting somebody with a hammer saying, “This is my point of view. This is my point of view.” Our lyrics invite you in. This is a point of view for all of us.

     
Sanctuary Sound II, Middletown, NJ, April 2009.
Phil Griffin (2009)
     
    JON: We were working on the Keep The Faith album when the riots broke out in LA. Rodney King got beat up in the streets and there was LA burning. That era was over. The 80s were done. We were up in Vancouver and we watched LA burning on television.
    “Keep The Faith” was a reaction to what we’d witnessed but we intentionally did not get specific. Hopefully people will understand the power of the lyric and what inspired it but in a