CRUSH : Track By Track Interview Interviewed by Jeff
Newman
1. CRUSH
Jon: When I came up with the title it was an accident.We were looking for
something that would perhaps mean different things to different people. It can
either be looked at as I've got a crush on you or I got crushed last
night, you know, I mean it can mean different things to the listener.
Richie: So we started just to kind of throw around things like Slippery When
Wet. It really doesn't mean anything but it's kind of sexy and cool, you know
what I mean, it's like you can imagine your mind starts to go. Actually, you
ever seen some girls in a shower together that's what I start to think
immediately! Jon just started saying some stuff and came up with Crush and I
like that a lot. I just thought that was cool. It's got sex. It' s got power and
it's fun.
2. IT'S MY LIFE
Jon: We started playing around and I came up with the title It's My Life and it
was really just The Animals and we wrote that big old anthemic chorus.
Richie: Lyrically it nods towards Tommy and Gina and we kind of bring those
characters in the second verse of this song. We also bring back the talk box
because it seemed to be more of our signature sound. We also use on the track
particularly to make it updated was a drum loop and lots of different drum
machines and stuff like that to combine it with a real drum set to kind of give
it classic Bon Jovi sound but an updated 2000 version.
3. SAY IT ISN'T SO
Jon: When people hear it now they are very surprised that I have written a song
like this, you know, both in lyrical content and musical value. But it' s
different and again has a rather positive chorus in that what it says
lyrically is Say it isn't so, tell me it's not true because you still have to be
able to dream, you have to be able to believe in role models, heroes or Santa
Claus. You know once you forget those dreams it becomes a boring
life.
4. THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME
Jon: If I were to write record credits on this album sleeve it would have said
Thank you for loving me,Thank you to Brad Pitt so that would have started a
hundred rumors! But the truth is a lot of times I got stories from movies. In
this case, I went to see the movie Meet Joe Black. Brad Pitt is holding Clare
Forlani in his arms at the end of the movie and he says thank you for loving me
and I went gotta go! I ran home and wrote that chorus and much like Always or
Bed of Roses or a lot of the hit ballads we've had over the years, I've always
written them by myself. They are rather easy for me to do. I saw the outline in
that movie, this was gonna be something I could knock out in ten minutes.
5. TWO STORY TOWN
Richie: Just the way Jon sang the song particularly was very very appealing to
me because it was fresh, something uncharted. He's almost speaking through the
verses with a small melody on it. I don't think we could have done it on the
past records but as Jon's maturing as a vocalist I think that he's able to do
different things and I wanted to show the side of the band from production
standpoint. So that was a song that I particularly guided onto this record and
made sure it was gonna get on be cause I had a passion on it.
6. NEXT 100 YEARS
Jon: The Japanese market called and asked do we have a song would fit this Kobay
Relief Fund, This thing called Jay Friends which is the boy bands in Japan, that
they could record and had a lyrical message that would support future
generations even and we said as a matter of fact we do. So we sent them the
original demo, these guys recorded it and it has sold somewhere close to
800/900,000 singles already. It was our first Japanese No.1 song on the domestic
charts. In all the hits we've had in Japan, it was the first domestic number one
single.
Richie: I came up with a crazy idea, this double time jam which lets me go crazy
as a guitar player. They basically let me go nuts for 3 minutes which I think
people dig live, and it also gives me a chance to expand myself as a guitar
player. I think what that does is tells people this band is still a rock band
with a lot of testosterone and we can actually really play our instruments.
There's a lot of bands out there that get deals nowadays and I ask how long have
you been playing and they say oh I've been playing for 6 months and that's what
they sound like. We wanted to prove to people that number 1- we can really play
and number 2- it excites people to come and see us live which is a big part of
our whole allure.
7. JUST OLDER
Jon: The lyrics say one simple thing in the chorus I like the bed I'm sleeping
in, just like me it's broken in, it's not old, just older. Like a favorite pairs
of torn blue jeans, the skin I'm in's alright with me, not old, just older.
That's sum it's up. When I sang this, my chest was out, my backbone was straight
and I was excited singing it, and I saw that the audience felt that. Regardless
of if you're 16, you think you were older than you were 12, or if you're 38 you
think you're older than you were 25 and when you're 50 you're gonna think you
were older than you were 35. So it's a question of feeling experience because of
this song.
8. MYSTERY TRAIN
Jon: I think that my lyrical hero Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits could be proud of the
pictures that I've created in this song. I think it's wonderful story in that it
is a boy/girl song, I created a lot of pictures and always use my wife as the
image of what I'm creating with it but there's more to the story than the cover.
I think that will be one of the songs that I'll love to play at night.
9. SAVE THE WORLD
Jon: Jerry Bruckheimer sent me the script of Armageddon and asked me to write a
song for the soundtrack and perhaps for the movie and when I read the script I
immediately knew that the character that Ben Affleck was playing leaving Liv
Tyler to go and save the world, finding out that he's in love with Liv Tyler 's
character and Bruce Willis being her dad in the film, was going to whip his ass
for it, being the wild boy in the film, here was the story to me, this is what I
was gonna write about. It was really obvious to me and I wrote the song and I
like the song very much. I put it away because I found out that they had their
ballad with Aerosmith doing the song. So it honed the lyric to make it a little
more personal but the basis of it comes from the script Armageddon.
10. CAPTAIN CRASH AND THE BEAUTY QUEEN FROM MARS
Jon: Richie came over to Rome while I was shooting U-571 to write. So we got
together there and I said you know I've got a strange one here and it's called
Captain Crash And The Beauty Queen From Mars. I said let's think of this guy. He
said yeah let's make him more Ziggy Stardust and have this fictional story of
these 2 screw ups who think that they on the cover of Time Newsweek and the
cover of Rolling Stones all in the same week and really they can't get out of
Their own way. But they're endearing characters so they've been completely
fictionalized mind you, but also somebody that you would like to be.
11. SHE'S A MYSTERY
Jon: She's A Mystery I wrote, believe it or not, at a songwriter's retreat. I
was invited to the South of France at what was truly a castle in the middle of
nowhere and it became one of the truly great writing. You would sit in a room
with 2 other people and develop a song - not for you, not for them, for the
wind, just to see what would happen, and you were forced to demo that song that
day. So it was almost like a test, could you or could you not. I got up really
early at dawn, picked up my guitar started playing and came up with this
progression and that title and started writing it so that when we walked in
there that day we knocked it out in ten minutes. The
song turned out so well that it actually made the band record which is not like
us to do anything like this.
12.I GOT A GIRL
Jon: You initially hear this song and good or bad, or in different, you're like
oh well, Jon Bon Jovi got the girl, isn't that great. But what you find out in
the last lyric of the song is that she'll always be a five year old princess and
it's about my daughter. I've never written a song about my kids before nor have
I ever wanted to. I don't know what influenced it other than I just spit it out
one day and I was really fond of the lyric and it's a
rock song and it's very up tempo with the surprise of being the last line. Every
dad that has a daughter especially as his first child you know you think what
have I done, this is my penance for the rest of my life! My joke about my
daughter is I've always said she'll be the prettiest girl in the convent.
13. ONE WILD NIGHT
Jon: The old team of Richie and myself and Desmond Childs, we wrote this song
together at least the first verse and part of the chorus but I thought of it as
Going To A Go Go and was so excited about it that I kept pushing. When I came up
home I wrote the rest of the lyric by myself and having already written music,
roughed it up. We came and demo it, changed a couple more of the lyrics around.
Certainly in the vein of You Give Love A Bad Name you'll wanna play it at night,
it'll be a big audience thing.
Richie: It's fun, classic Bon Jovi track aka Bad Medicine, great guitar line, a
fun lyric and it's about a party that lasts this one wild evening. We tried to
lyrically take a guy from his doorstep, out through the evening and follow him
around with a camera in our mind's eye as lyricists. He meets people, he meets a
girl parties his ass off and does all that kind of stuff, so it was one of those
that came together like that.
14. I COULD MAKE A LIVNG OUT OF LOVIN' YOU
Jon: This is something that when I played for Richie. He said boy great verse,
great b section. I said no that's the chorus and he said no great b section -
thanks a lot brother! So we sat down and wrote a chorus for it and
he became a collaborator on the track. I'm glad that he pushed me further. It's
in the vein of AC/DC stadium rock, you know, but a fun song, a real black
T-shirt crowd thing.