I thought this was pretty close:

Bon Jovi - The Circle

Jovi's last album was a counrty records. This time they've been on X-Factor. What's going on?

"I'm the CEO of a corporation who's been running a brand for 25 years", says Jon Bon Jovi in When We Were Beautiful, a documentary DVD that accompanies his band's eleventh studio album, The Circle. "I'm not some guy ina rock band."

Mmmm. Brand? Corporation? Really makes you want to hear The Circle, doesn't it?

Sentiments like those tend to reinforce the reputation JBJ has as a somewhat humourless purveyor of hugely skilful, artistically hollow music. At most, that perception is half-truth, as The Circle makes clear.

Rock stardom is supposed to be a vocation, not a job of work, although anyone who's ever been on the road for more than two or three days will tell you that a job is exactly what it can be, with it's repetitions and its demands.

Here, JBJ has turned his pragmatic nature into a virtue, both in the way he runs his business and in the way he allows its mundanities to connect him, however tenuosly, to the working man he spends much of his time thinking about.

If The Circle has an overaching theme, it is Bon Jovi's recurring one: the hope of escape from the quotidian. From Runaway and LOAP to WFTWM and Brokenpromiseland, it has run throughout his career.

Where someone like Bruce Springsteen is able to express the feeling in a nuanced, personal manner, JBJ's problem has often been his clodhopping way with words.

Throughout The Circle, dreams are shattered, stars fall from the sky, people are pushed down and knocked around and reminded to live before they die. It's a tin ear rather than a lack of effort, though: the exubarance of the music shows that. This is a record that's ultimately redeemed by some tremendous stadium rock tunes.

The biggest of those - and there are several big ones - is WWWB, but perhaps the best are a couple of [relatively] less heated moments, Fast Cars and Love's The Only Rule.

There's a hint in the album title that the band have arrived somewhere back around where they started, and in terms of an unabashed celebration of what they do best, it's true. But the real redeeming feature of both the record and, you'd suspect, of JBJ himself, is the rueful note now apparent in his sturdy, shopworn voice.

7/10
Jon Hotten

Personally, I would give The Circle a lower rating and I don't see or hear the redeeming qualities, but I agree with the CEO/corporation stuff and the bad lyrical content...

Ice