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How Jon Bon Jovi’s vocal cord surgery inspired the group’s latest album: ‘There was a new appreciation for life’

by · June 9, 2024

“I’ve come through the surgery. I’ve come through Richie leaving the band. I’ve come through all these other obstacles… How do you write that next chapter?”

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Jon Bon Jovi is standing at a precipice. The Grammy-winning rocker is backstage at American Idol, where he’s just finished mentoring the season’s final three contestants — one of whose life will forever change that evening. In a few short hours, his own world will shift too, as he steps out to sing Bon Jovi‘s latest track, “Legendary,” for an audience live on national television.

Or, as he tells it, “I’m competing in season 27, trying to get a record deal,” he teases over Zoom. “I’m the oldest-ever contestant.”

It’s been a long and winding road to get to this moment. The Sayreville, N.J., native kick-started his career as the cool crooner for several local bands, including Atlantic City Expressway, before taking local radio — and then, the entire country — by storm with Bon Jovi’s sizzling 1984 debut single, “Runaway.” A steady stream of Billboard chart–topping hits — including “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and “Bad Medicine” — catapulted the group into the stratosphere, with them going on to write 15 studio albums, get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and tour the globe for the next 40 years.

Bon Jovi frontman Jon Bon Jovi
Jon Bon Jovi.MARK SELIGER

But their success didn’t come without hardship. In 2013, guitarist Richie Sambora abruptly exited the band and, just two years later, Bon Jovi began experiencing issues with that both literally and metaphorically stole his voice from him. While he attempted to treat the discomfort he felt in his vocal cords with red light therapy and coaching, it wasn’t until he pushed himself to the brink of exhaustion performing the group’s demanding 21-track set lists on their 2020 tour that he sought help and ultimately underwent surgery to repair his vocal cords in 2022.

His subsequent healing process, which is chronicled in this year’s retrospective Hulu docuseries Thank You Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, not only returned his gift to him after he’d endured years of heartache, but also paved the way for new material, which began pouring out of him.

“I went into this surgery and I had a lot of time on my hands — all I could really do was sit around and start to think about songs,” Bon Jovi tells Entertainment Weekly now. “I started to feel joy again. And we — the collective we, who lived through COVID — we’d all come out of that fog, and we were interacting again. There was a new appreciation for life. And I was having this new appreciation for my body. And it led to all these songs.”

Soon after he tapped into this creative wellspring, the singer and his bandmates — David Bryan, Tico Torres, Everett Bradley, John Shanks, Hugh McDonald, and Phil X, who was a temporary replacement for Sambora before becoming an official member in 2016 — found themselves riding a brand-new sound wave together. The result is Forever, a 12-track album relating the recent triumphs and tribulations of Bon Jovi’s legendary life. “We went in and recorded it in seven weeks,” he recalls. “Nothing was on delay. It just flowed.”

Some songs came easier than others. The pulsing “Living Proof” — which, with its talkbox guitar, evokes the group’s previous songs “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “It’s My Life” — took “two full days to write, which is not the usual,” Bon Jovi says. However, its message, about casting away your underdog status and believing in yourself — took much longer to materialize.

“I think that when you’re a young man, you’ve always got that chip on your shoulder — like, ‘I’ll show you,'” he explains. But these days, he says, “There’s still a desire to be great, but without having to prove it to myself. I realize now, at this vantage point, who the ‘I’ll show you’ was. The ‘you’ was the guy in the mirror. And now I realize that I could be nicer to the guy in the mirror.”

Adding a sprinkle of Bon Jovi’s signature talkbox just felt right. “This song just called for it — that guitar riff we wrote the song to called for it. Simple as that,” says the musician, before cheekily adding, “God bless Peter Frampton and Joe Walsh for showing us how to work it — we sort of stole it.”

Jon Bon Jovi
Bon Jovi.MARK SELIGER

Even his most singular experiences tackled on the record maintain a sense of everyman relatability, from lead single “Legendary,” with its feel-good chorus detailing a Friday night spent singing along to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” with loved ones, to “Kiss the Bride,” a sentimental tune the frontman penned for his daughter Stephanie’s wedding day. The father and daughter haven’t had the chance to listen to the track together yet, but he fully believes “we’ll both be sobbing” when they do. (His son, Jake Bongiovi, also got married recently, tying the knot with Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown in May.)

“Hollow Man,” Forever‘s country-twanged closer and a highlight on the record, sees Bon Jovi at his most honest and vulnerable, cleansed of some of the dark shades of his past and ready to begin again. “The idea of being hollow is just being ready to accept whatever God’s willing to give me,” the singer says. “It’s saying, ‘Fill me up.’ I’m not jaded — I’m not ignorant or arrogant enough to think that I can’t learn every day. I’m much too vain to just bulls— myself and write you some kind of lyric that doesn’t move my heart.”

Instead, the track serves as both the literal end of the album and the metaphorical start of the next chapter in his life and recovery. “‘What do you sing when your song has been sung?'” he asks, quoting its lyrics. “And, as you’re writing your 18th album, the song has ‘been sung.'”

Bon Jovi continues, “‘Who do you fight when the war has been won?’ Because I’ve come through the surgery. I’ve come through Richie leaving the band. I’ve come through all these other obstacles. ‘What do you write when your book is done?’ How do you write that next chapter? And so as I wrote the song, I realized, ‘Wow, it’s telling my story where I’m at right now.'”

Performing these songs alongside his bandmates at their monthly New Jersey rehearsals, which have tracked the progress of his vocal health, has also brought the group closer together than ever before in their collective story. “There’s no end zone, there’s no goal, there’s no tour booked, no one’s getting paid,” he says. “We’re there for the pure love of each other and the desire to make music. You could just tell in the room that we’re doing it for the right reasons, and I’m so appreciative of each and every one of them. Because when I told them we’re not touring in ’24 they could have all said ‘I want’ or ‘I’m going out on the road.’ There could have been 10 excuses. But nobody’s doing anything other than waiting once a month to come to New Jersey.”

And while the pounding “Walls of Jericho” and cathartic chorus of “Living in Paradise” may already feel like stadium-ready bangers, Bon Jovi isn’t putting any pressure on himself to play Forever live around the country, or the world. “It takes a lot of courage to go out and sing on American Idol right now, you know what I mean?” he says, referring to the hurdles he’s faced with his health. “That takes a lot, but I have no worry that I’m going to nail it. So I’m getting there. The point is, I got to be able to do two and a half hours a night, four nights a week, before I’m gonna say yes… And then, God willing, we can take it out on the road and get out there with the people and then see their reaction to it.”

For now, performing alongside his fistful of friends is legendary enough. “Until we can take it to the next level,” the singer says, “all I can tell you is that when I’m in the room rehearsing, there’s nothing but love. I mean, just singing ‘Legendary’ live with the guys, we just all smile.”

“Not only are we doing it because we’re playing together, but I get to jokingly say — and also mean it — ‘Oh, time to play another hit. Oh well,'” he adds, pretending to be glum before cracking one of those smiles. “It’s a hit and you’re like, ‘Damn, this feels good.'”

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