I grew up on country music. ‘90s country, mostly. My mom was and is a big country music fan as were my grandparents. My grandmother’s favorite country artist was Vince Gill. My brother’s Shania Twain. Mine was Brooks & Dunn. I thought (and continue to think, even today) that Ronnie Dunn has one of the greatest voices in the music industry. And while my tastes in music these days run more towards the hard gothic rock of Black Veil Brides and In This Moment, I continue to buy Ronnie Dunn’s solo albums and look forward to his new record, 100 Proof Neon, which comes out a little later this month. So, yeah, I grew up a country fan. But tastes change. Transitional drugs exist. And my transitional drug into the world of rock was Bon Jovi.
In 2005, Bon Jovi released what I consider to be their last really, really good album as a complete work, Have A Nice Day. The title track and lead single for that record continues to be one of my favorites from the band (and yes, I think it’s better than “It’s My Life”) but that’s not what hooked me. It’s what reeled me in, but it wasn’t what hooked me. That honor went to the country crossover song, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home”, which featured Jennifer Nettles and topped the Billboard Country Charts, making them the first (and only, to the best of my knowledge) rock band to have a #1 country hit. That was my first exposure to Bon Jovi that I can recall (so many of their songs are iconic, I’m sure I’ve heard one of them maybe in the background at a restaurant as I slurped up a milkshake, not paying attention to anything but the frosty goodness in my hands). I started following the band after that. They released a country record, Lost Highway, in 2007 and followed it up with a return to their rock “roots” with The Circle in 2009 which didn’t really live up to the previous HAND release four years prior. But it was still decent enough. I’d have to wait until 2013 to get my next taste of Bon Jovi. And that’s when things changed.
They released a greatest hits album in 2010, Jon Bon Jovi did some solo stuff by starring and singing in the Gary Marshall film, New Years Eve, and he wrote two original songs for the crime comedy film, Stand Up Guys. But in January of 2013, we got the first taste of what would become the new long-awaited Bon Jovi album with the release of the single, “Because We Can”. I remember when that song came out. I was a senior in high school starting my final semester. I woke up early just to log into the family desktop so I could hear the new song before my zero-period jazz band class. I only had time to listen to it once. And the song was so goddamn catchy, I developed ear worm. Not even fully knowing the words, I hummed that damned song all day until I finally got home and was able to listen to it again…and again…and again…and again until the lyrics became second nature. I listened to it so much that it gave my brother PTSD and he still demands I turn it off every time I start playing it to this day.
The album, What About Now, came out in March of that year and…it wasn’t great. I think it was the worst Bon Jovi album up to that point and I still consider it their worst album to date. It did have a couple of good songs, “Because We Can” being one of them, but, for the first time, there was more bad than good. Things got worse when Ritchie Sambora, the lead guitarist of the band and co-writer with Jon Bon Jovi on most of the band’s songs, left mid-tour. For the first time since I’ve been alive, the band’s future was in question.
In 2015, they released Burning Bridges, a “fan album” presented as a bootleg to fulfill their current record contract before they went indie. The album’s cover was depicted as brown paper bag with the vague outline of a disc with the band’s name and the album’s title seemingly written on it in pencil. The album was made up of mostly outtakes from the mid-to-late 2000s and 2010s (not Bon Jovi’s greatest years) though there were a couple of new tracks added in to keep the record fresh. The album was presented as a throw-away and I guess it pretty much was. It suffered from a lot of the same problems What About Now did but, like that record, it had a couple of really good songs on it. The lead single, “Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning”, was a catchy tune previously recorded during the sessions for The Circle. I liked it. It was grainy and clearly a demo but it wasn’t hard to see why it wasn’t properly produced and included on the final track list back in 2009—the song bore an eerie resemblance to the Nickelback song, “Gotta Be Somebody”. The second and final single was a new song recorded during the sessions for their next “proper” album. It was called “We Don’t Run” and was supposed to be a sneak peak for what was to come. I like that song a lot and was mildly impressed with it when it was released. I remember thinking that maybe they wouldn’t miss a beat without Sambora. That turned out not to be true but it was a promising sign nonetheless.
In the end, Bon Jovi never went indie. After the release of the spiteful Burning Bridges, Jon and the record executives at Mercery/Universal made up and in 2016, their long-awaited thirteenth studio album was released, This House Is Not For Sale. The title track was released as the lead single and I really liked it. It had some of those Americana throwbacks to “Have A Nice Day” with the opening riff and I dug it. During promotional interviews, Jon said some things that really stood out to me. The first to capture my attention was when he described the new record as a mashup between Have A Nice Day and 1995’s These Days, the latter being my favorite Bon Jovi album. Needless to say, the record wasn’t that. It was a record full of mostly filler songs that were propped up by the handful of good tracks on the track list. But the other thing Jon said during his various interviews was this: “From great pain comes great art”. This House Is Not For Sale is not a great album. It’s fine but not great. Still, that line struck a chord with me and I do believe it to be true. JBJ was going through some shit when they were working on that album and I do think it shows in some of the songs. From great pain comes great art.
I won’t talk much about the composition of my novel, Bunny Boy. I aired all that shit out in my 19,000 word essay, “Radio Silence and a Whisper in the Static”, which will be included as an afterword in the back of the paperback edition of the novel. What I will say is that I was in a lot of pain emotionally. I think everybody was in 2020 but my spiral had been brewing a long time and it finally came to ahead. I was unhappy. Pissed off. Suicidal, even. I felt lost and for the first time in my adult life, there was absolutely nothing to look forward to. It was full dark and all the stars in the sky were extinguished. Like I said at the beginning of this little blog post, I tell stories. It’s what I do. And in my misery, I sat down and started writing what I thought was going to be a short story titled “Bunny Boy, Bunny Boy”. And the manuscript grew. And grew. I was angry and my therapy was in session. I had no aspirations of publishing the book until the first draft was done and I was doing my first readthrough. Publication was the furthest thing from my mind. I was just working through some of my emotional issues the only way it made sense to me—by writing it down and dressing it up in fiction to act as my crutch.
Bunny Boy is a very angry book written by a very angry young man who was feeling betrayed. And I think all that rage and resentment bleeds through every page. From great pain comes great art, eh? I sit here today happy to announce that the book is nearly ready for publication. The tentative release date is November 4, 2022. I’ve worked very hard on it and I became very proud of it once I was able to distance myself from all the pain and heartache that went into crafting it. It’s book about religious trauma, parenthood, and the meaninglessness of life. I’ll post the synopsis below. And, like I tend to do, there will be some rewards for those of you who purchase the book in its physical paperback edition. I love physical media. I still buy CDs, paperback and hardcover books, Blu-Ray movies, and physical video games. I think there is an important craft to physical media and it should be preserved. So, if you buy the physical copy of Bunny Boy on November 4th, collected in the back of the book will be a new short story titled “The Condom Balloon” and the essay I referred to earlier. I had so much fun working on this project and I really hope you all will enjoy reading it.
I think I’ll call it there. There’ll be more blog posts leading up to the release of the novel. But if you want more, please consider following me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find the links to all my social media at the top of my webpage. Thanks for sticking it out with me and, until next time, keep reading.
-CW