Jon Bongiovi Jr. was once just a 21-year-old kid from New Jersey with a dream – and a cousin who ran one of the best studios in New York – when he recorded “Runaway” and began getting airplay on local radio. Within a year, he’d signed a record deal, adopted a phonetic spelling of his last name and formed an eponymous band with keyboardist David Bryan, guitarist Richie Sambora, bassist Alec John Such and drummer Tico Torres.
Over the last four decades, Bon Jovi has been, for many, the platonic ideal of an arena rock band, thanks to their movie star-handsome frontman and big riffs that never overpower their pop hooks. After struggling for a few years to break through, the band exploded in 1986 with their third album, Slippery When Wet, which eventually sold 12 million copies in America alone. Bon Jovi have gradually faded from the pop charts, but they never stopped selling tickets, and occasionally pivoted with unlikely triumphs like 2006’s No. 1 country radio hit “Who Says You Can’t Go Home.”
With the band’s 16th studio album, Forever, having just been released, we evaluate how it stacks up alongside past favorites such as Slippery When Wet and New Jersey.
16. Burning Bridges (2015)
The first Bon Jovi effort without Sambora has the bitter tinge of a divorce album, but the ex at issue on Burning Bridges wasn’t the band’s longtime guitarist. Instead, Bon Jovi were breaking up with Mercury Records, their label of 32 years, fulfilling their contract by finishing off some outtakes from late period albums and indifferently slapping some minimalist cover art on it. Burning Bridges was charitably described as “an album for fans” to help promote the group’s latest tour, but even diehard followers probably don’t revisit it much. Often plodding and rarely profound, it’s heavy on ballads such as “Who Would You Die For.” The band only sounds like they’re having fun on the closing title track, flipping the bird to Mercury: “Here’s one last song you can sell / Let’s call it ‘Burning Bridges,’ it’s a singalong as well / Hope my money and my masters buy a front row seat in hell.”
15. Have a Nice Day (2005)
In 2005, John Shanks won the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for his work with Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson and Robbie Robertson. A few months later, Bon Jovi released the first of many albums with Shanks as producer and co-writer. Have a Nice Day is a fairly predictable and by-the-numbers Bon Jovi album, although “Last Cigarette” features one of Sambora’s finest guitar solos, and “Last Man Standing” summons some of the wild west drama of “Wanted (Dead or Alive).” Six months after the album was released, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” was re-recorded with rootsy instrumentation and vocals from Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles, and became a surprise country chart-topper. “Bon Jovi mean so little short or long term that it was only with this redolently entitled cheese bomb that I realized they hadn’t actually broken up back in the fable ‘90s,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice review of Have a Nice Day.
14. Lost Highway (2007)
In the early 2000s, rock and pop artists were going country so regularly that it started to become a music industry cliché – an easy way for an aging act to reinvent themselves and reach a lucrative new market. After the Jennifer Nettles version of “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” became the biggest hit from Have a Nice Day, Bon Jovi headed to Nashville to make Lost Highway and keep that momentum rolling. Half of the album was produced by Dann Huff (Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw) and the band wrote songs with Hillary Lindsey (Taylor Swift, Faith Hill) and Brett James (Carrie Underwood, Martina McBride). The modest twang suits Jon Bon Jovi’s voice surprisingly well at times, and “Any Other Day” is one of the band’s finest deep cuts. There are also, unfortunately, goofy missteps like the Big & Rich collaboration “We Got It Going On.” “(You Want To) Make a Memory” and the LeAnn Rimes duet “Till We Ain’t Strangers Anymore” didn’t set country radio on fire like “Who Says,” and Bon Jovi quickly returned to their rock’n’roll comfort zone.
13. What About Now (2013)
What About Now starts out rough with “Because We Can,” which is perhaps the weakest lead single in Bon Jovi’s catalog, and becomes even more bland with the next track, “I’m With You.” The acoustic songs “Amen” and “The Fighter” come across better than the rockers, but Sambora had one foot out the door, and overall it feels like a tentative transitional record. Regardless, Because We Can: The Tour became the top-grossing concert trek of 2013 despite both Sambora’s departure after a few shows and its subpar parent album. “Anyone who’s stuck with the Jersey boys so far won’t mind this album’s guitar bluster, or its lyrical mixed metaphors. Jon Bon is variously ‘a soldier’ (‘Army of One’), ‘not a soldier’ (‘Because We Can’) and ‘the fighter, though not a boxer’ (‘The Fighter’),” wrote James Manning in the Time Out review of What About Now.
12. Forever (2024)
Jon Bon Jovi is now 62 years old, and he suddenly sounds like it on Forever after a couple years of suffering from long COVID and recuperating from vocal surgery. For the first time in his career, he isn’t sure when or if he’ll be able to perform these songs live, so it’s poignant to hear rock’s eternal prom king sound so defeated on “Hollow Man” or look back on his nightlife misadventures in the past tense on “We Made It Look Easy.” Unfortunately, late period Bon Jovi albums tend to follow a familiar formula so closely that you’d be hard pressed to guess which song was co-written by Jason Isbell or Ed Sheeran.
11. Bounce (2002)
In the early 2000s, Jon Bon Jovi cautiously started to get more politically active, hosting an Al Gore fundraiser at his house and writing about current events and social issues more pointedly on the band’s albums. Released a couple months after Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, Bounce is another post-9/11 love letter to New York from a New Jersey rock icon, but it can’t help but come off as less moving and impactful. “Undivided” and “Hook Me Up” feature some of the heaviest, most distorted guitar riffs in the Bon Jovi catalog, but that nu-metal crunch sounds out of place next to graceful midtempo material like “Misunderstood.”
10. The Circle (2009)
In the wake of the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, Jon Bon Jovi took a swing at being a voice for the voiceless on “Work for the Working Man.” Once again, Bon Jovi had the bad timing to try to sum up the country’s mood shortly after their old pal Springsteen had already done so on his album Working on a Dream. Still, The Circle’s fist-pumping anthems had a sense of purpose that resonated, and the Grammy-winning “We Weren’t Born To Follow” stands as their most recent Hot 100 hit. “Love Is the Only Rule” is probably the most straight-laced piece of music to ever namecheck John Coltrane. “These songs are consumed with family and community and more prone to pie for long-term love than for the one-night stands. Yet such maturity has not found its way into the music,” wrote Scott McLennan in the Boston Globe review of The Circle.
9. 2020 (2020)
Jon Bon Jovi decided to name the band’s 15th album after its year of release partly in a nod to the looming significance of an election year. Naturally, the year 2020 became far more historically significant than he’d anticipated with the arrival of COVID-19. When Bon Jovi canceled their tour and pushed back the release of 2020 for a few months, they worked up two more songs for the album, penning “American Reckoning” about the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, and “Do What You Can” about the need for community in times of crisis. A trio of six-minute songs, including the monotonous waltz “Story of Love,” make the album feel a little bloated, and Jon is now a bit too much of a middle-aged MSNBC liberal to write great political songs. The urgency and earnestness of 2020 is nevertheless affecting at times, particularly on “Lower the Flag,” a strident acoustic track about mass shootings.
8. 7800° Fahrenheit (1985)
Jon’s cousin Ted Bongiovi produced the band’s 1984 debut with frequent collaborator Lance Quinn (Lita Ford, Nils Lofgren), but producing the follow-up was left to Quinn alone, and Bon Jovi suffered from the classic sophomore slump: stuck in a rut as an opening act that couldn’t quite break through to headliner status. The band has all but disowned the album, purging all its songs from their setlists in the early ‘90s and only occasionally reviving the highlight “Tokyo Road” for shows in Japan and Hawaii. It’s actually a pretty solid hard rock record, though – a little heavier than the sound Bon Jovi would come to be known for, with the classic Bon Jovi logo making its first appearance on the cover. 7800° Fahrenheit went platinum after the band hit the big time, and the second single “In and Out of Love” appears on the best-selling 1994 hits compilation Cross Road.
7. Crush (2000)
Swedish hitmaker Max Martin is one of the most successful songwriters of all time, but at the turn of the millennium, he was primarily known for working with teen pop acts such as Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. He and a group of rockers pushing 40 may have seemed like an odd fit, but Bon Jovi had never been shy about collaborating with outside writers, and “It’s My Life” combined TRL-friendly pop polish with “Livin’ on a Prayer” nostalgia to become the band’s most enduring single since the ‘80s. Crush also marked the arrival of another co-writer who’d stick around for many future Bon Jovi albums: Billy Falcon, a New York singer/songwriter who’d released music since the ‘70s and scored the top 40 hit “Power Windows” in the early ‘90s. He wrote four songs with Jon for Crush, a bright and playful album that ranges from the power pop of “Say It Isn’t So” to the glam rock throwback “Captain Crash & the Beauty Queen from Mars.” “Jon does a fine job of shaking his Bon-Bon to the blow-dried, rockish tunes on Crush,” Rob Sheffield wrote in the Rolling Stone review.
6. Bon Jovi (1984)
JBJ recorded “Runaway” with session musicians and got it on the radio before he had a real band, so considering that this self-titled debut was hastily assembled around a hit single that was already out in the world, it’s remarkable just how quickly the band gelled, and how well the frontman and Sambora wrote together on early collaborations such as “Roulette” and “Get Ready.” Mercury Records clearly didn’t know what they had on their hands yet, so the follow-up to “Runaway” was the only song in the Bon Jovi catalog not written by a member of the band. Indeed, the hokey “She Don’t Know Me,” penned by Wild Cherry’s Mark Avsec, nearly doomed Bon Jovi to one hit wonder status before they’d even hit their stride.
5. This House Is Not for Sale (2016)
Bon Jovi solidified its post-Sambora lineup on This House Is Not for Sale, adding new lead guitarist Phil X as well as finally bringing in two longtime collaborators as official band members: Shanks, who’d produced and played guitar on the band’s albums for a decade, and Hugh McDonald, a frequent session bassist dating all the way back to “Runaway.” From the hard-charging title track to the autumnal “Scars on This Guitar,” This House Is Not for Sale gave the band a new lease on life despite the absence of a key founding member, and became their sixth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. “There’s an intriguing new vulnerability,” David Simpson wrote in The Guardian’s review of This House Is Not for Sale.
4. Keep the Faith (1992)
In the four years between New Jersey and Keep the Faith, everything that possibly could’ve happened to destroy Bon Jovi’s popularity happened. JBJ himself got married, made a solo album and cut his hair, and a bunch of young bands from Seattle were quickly threatening to make hair metal irrelevant. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Bon Jovi managed to persevere into the ‘90s with another multi-platinum album and another big power ballad, “Bed of Roses.” The band’s image was more down-to-earth, but their sound didn’t change all that much, as “Woman in Love” and “Fear” certainly would’ve fit in just fine on their ‘80s albums. The 10-minute “Dry County” is the longest and most ambitious song in the Bon Jovi catalog, and it’s not quite their “November Rain,” but the second half features some pretty majestic guitar solo showboating by Sambora.
3. New Jersey (1988)
Two years after Slippery When Wet became a phenomenon, Bon Jovi and producer Bruce Fairbairn got back together to try to make it happen all over again. New Jersey feels like a typical late ‘80s blockbuster sequel in the vein of Ghostbusters II or Beverly Hills Cop II – loud, fun and full of efficient fan service, with a few new quirks to make it memorable in its own right, but simply not as good as it was last time. The album’s five top 10 singles are all overblown in different ways – some more enjoyable than others – but tracks such as “99 in the Shade” and “Homebound Train” capture the infectious energy of a band enjoying their time at the top.
2. These Days (1995)
In 1994, Bon Jovi released their first greatest hits album, Cross Road, which featured their final top 10 hit to date, “Always.” They also fired Such, the band’s first major lineup change. Releasing These Days a year later, Bon Jovi were further from the zeitgeist than they’d ever been before, and they knew it: the video for “Something for the Pain” contrasted the band with comical Eddie Vedder, Dr. Dre and Courtney Love lookalikes. Even with hard rock vet Peter Collins (Alice Cooper, Billy Squier) in the producer’s chair, These Days felt like a mature and soulful step back from the sound that made the band famous, even featuring a brassy R&B groove on “Damned.” These Days barely sold a million copies in America as the band’s crossover hits started to dry up, but the album has grown into a fan favorite over the years, and JBJ and Sambora’s harmonies have never sounded better than on “This Ain’t a Love Song” and “Lie to Me.”
1. Slippery When Wet (1986)
Desmond Child was a pro songwriter who’d penned one big hit for Kiss back in the ‘70s before he began writing with Jon Bon Jovi and Sambora. Child, who was disappointed by the chart performance of Bonnie Tyler’s “If You Were a Woman,” recycled its melody for “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and it was the magic bullet that turned Bon Jovi’s make-or-break third album into a diamond-selling monster hit. Before Bon Jovi, hard rock bands just about never topped the Hot 100, aside from Van Halen’s synth-heavy “Jump.” But after “Bad Name” and “Livin’ on a Prayer” hit number one and “Wanted Dead or Alive” went top 10, the floodgates opened up for Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Poison and others. That trio of classic singles carries Slippery When Wet, but the whole album feels like a stadium singalong, and the exhilarating closer “Wild in the Streets” is a taste of Bon Jovi at their most E Street Band.