Livin' On A Prayer
Bon Jovi never worked a dock or a diner. He was a kid from New Jersey who’d been hustling the music industry since his teens, sweeping floors at his cousin’s recording studio just to get in the door.
That’s the fact to keep in your pocket while the song plays, because the song is about people he wasn’t. Tommy and Gina. Tommy’s lost his job. Gina works the diner all day. They’ve got nothing but each other and the belief that someday things get better. It is corny. It is also true for millions of people, and the man who wrote it knew the difference between living it and watching it from the floor he was sweeping.
He understood aspiration. He understood what it feels like to believe in something despite all the evidence telling you to stop. That isn’t the same as being broke. But it’s close enough to carry the song, and the song doesn’t pretend otherwise. It just means every word.
The talk box is the first thing you hear. Richie Sambora’s guitar run through it, the wah-wah vocal effect that names the song before Jon Bon Jovi opens his mouth. Call it a gimmick. It’s also the reason you can identify the whole thing in half a second. Most songs don’t get half a second. This one earned it on the first note and never gave it back.
Then the key change. The final chorus lifts a half step, the whole thing rises, and it lands exactly where Tommy and Gina need it to. We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got. The song goes up at the moment the people in it have nothing. That’s not an accident of arrangement. That’s the writing.
I’ve been in bars when this comes on. I’ve seen strangers who won’t make eye contact suddenly singing together, arms around shoulders, screaming the chorus like their lives depend on it.
That doesn’t happen because the song is clever. It happens because the song is sincere all the way down, cheese and all, and people can tell. A man who came up sweeping floors wrote a hymn for the people still on the floor, meant every word of it, and a room full of strangers hears that and stops being strangers for four minutes.
Some songs are silly. This one is communion.
