[BJFan99]

Originally Posted by Supersonic

Aloha !



Because his royal mighty I is wrong.

With Jon Bon Jovi you're no longer talking about a man who's lost a bit of his range, you're talking about a man who can't sing anymore.

According to Jon, the first verse of a simple song like We Weren't Born To Follow goes like this, and no, those aren't typos.

This one goes out to the man who mines for miracles
This one goes out
to the ones
in
need
This one goes out
to the sinner and the cynical
ain't about
no apologies
This road was paved by the hopeless and the henry
This road was paved
On the winds of chance
Walking beside
the guilty and the innocent
How will you raise your hands
for your name?

After the first line his timing is off and by the end of the verse he's making up words and/or (mostly and) is skipping words altogether just to make sure some sound is coming out.

Think I'm kidding? Check this video:
Bon Jovi - We weren´t born to follow, Chile 2017. - YouTube

That's from the supposedly fantastic 2017 South American tour.

Really, if he can't sing We Weren't Born To Follow then he's surely not able to sing anything else either. Sure, he'd be able to whisper himself through bits and pieces of the first lines of the chorus of The Distance, but the line "I'll never give up the fight" is impossible for him nowadays.



No, he can't sing the songs you mentioned and your example of You Had Me From Hello proves it. "And when you're laying down beside me" is strained, because his range is gone. Your example is from 3 years ago and his vocals are at the absolute biggest low of his career now. It's not like its gotten any better the last few years, right? The same would go for Bitter Wine, the chorus requires him to sing a few lines as opposed to whisper them and it'd sound strained and flat again.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

After thinking about it a bit more, you're probably right, as sad as it is to admit.

But I feel for Jon about this situation. He undoubtedly knows himself and his voice better than any of us, and you can bet that he's pissed.

I'm pissed, too - but in a different way than he is or you are. I'm sad, and I still somehow believe that he'll be able to improve. Definitely not back to any of his previous levels, but back to a level where at least some of his performances are honestly listenable.

You can clearly see him being angry and frustrated about his voice not working properly here (and on many other These Days performances from the BWC tour as well):

https://youtu.be/wmwXEeS6zyE

I vaguely remember someone mentioning last year how fun it would be to see the rest of the band give Jon a massive stink eye every time he f***s up vocally. As you can see, there's no need for it - he already does it himself!

[DavetheGodofKeys]

[QUOTE=Supersonic;1234061]Aloha !



Because his royal mighty I is wrong.

With Jon Bon Jovi you're no longer talking about a man who's lost a bit of his range, you're talking about a man who can't sing anymore.

According to Jon, the first verse of a simple song like We Weren't Born To Follow goes like this, and no, those aren't typos.

This one goes out to the man who mines for miracles
This one goes out
to the ones
in
need
This one goes out
to the sinner and the cynical
ain't about
no apologies
This road was paved by the hopeless and the henry
This road was paved
On the winds of chance
Walking beside
the guilty and the innocent
How will you raise your hands
for your name?

After the first line his timing is off and by the end of the verse he's making up words and/or (mostly and) is skipping words altogether just to make sure some sound is coming out.

Think I'm kidding? Check this video:

Bon Jovi - We weren´t born to follow, Chile 2017....

That's from the supposedly fantastic 2017 South American tour.

The only good shows on the South American tour were RIR and Sao Paulo. Nobody's saying the whole tour South American tour was fantastic.

[BJFan99]

Originally Posted by Tom_K

Adding pauses in the middle of verses is not a voice issue. He does it even where there's absolutely no need for it.

Look at the Rock in Rio 2017 and song Raise Your Hands. He' completely off key during the whole songs but he sings some verses in one piece while breaking some apart for no apparent reason. And it's always the same verses.

"Gonna set .... the night in fire"
"Playing to .... win"
"It's up to .... you"

It's annoying because you don't expect it and it breaks the flow.

Sometimes I feel like we're watching a version of The Emperor's New Clothes but in this case noone has the balls to tell the emperor his singing is dreadful.

In this case, no one needs to tell the emperor anything, as he undoubtedly knows it all by himself. However, there's only so much (or little, in fact) that he can do about it, and that's why we're all so grateful for YouTube - after all, there you can always revisit pretty much any prime-era BJ concert you want (well, not literally any, but close enough). This one's currently my absolute favorite:

https://youtu.be/Dy9NODFkj9k

Bloody hell, the whole European leg of the KTF tour was magical. The guys were on f***ing fire in every single f***ing show! God, how I wish to have been around back then, so I would've been able to catch them up at their best live form...

EDIT: Prior to this date, I never noticed that Jon played his acoustic on BOR at the show I posted above! Does anybody here know if he did it somewhere else around that time as well?

[Tom_K]

Originally Posted by BJFan99

In this case, no one needs to tell the emperor anything, as he undoubtedly knows it all by himself. However, there's only so much (or little, in fact) that he can do about it, and that's why we're all so grateful for YouTube - after all, there you can always revisit a prime-era BJ concert (pick your favorite, there are so many):

Somebody should tell him that it makes more sense to retire than stain that legacy. He's not doing himself or the band any favors carrying on with these awful performances.

It's obvious it's a mental issue. Go to a shrink, call Richie and sort stuff out. Remove whatever is the cause but stop butchering these amazing songs.

[BJFan99]

Originally Posted by Tom_K

Somebody should tell him that it makes more sense to retire than stain that legacy. He's not doing himself or the band any favors carrying on with these awful performances.

It's obvious it's a mental issue. Go to a shrink, call Richie and sort stuff out. Remove whatever is the cause but stop butchering these amazing songs.

What if he actually WANTS to keep his career going? Let's face it, Jon might get slapped here for no longer having the same amount of passion for making music/performing as he once did, but I don't think he's lost much of it either. If he had, he surely wouldn't have been even willing to continue, let alone have basically pushed the band forward after the stressful mess that was the BWC tour.

JBJ is and has always been a workaholic (after all, he's even admitted it himself), but it's because of his passion. Would his passion have died at some point, he wouldn't be doing these things anymore.

Deep inside, he's still that Jersey boy with dreams bigger than his hair (*insert an imaginary laugh track here*) to fulfill that he was back in 1982 when he first walked into that radio station outside the Long Island Expressway. There may not be much left of that guy for some - if not many - of you, but he's clearly still there, somewhere. You just have to look a little harder, a little deeper, a little longer.

I'm sorry for getting a bit poetic/author-like, but this is just how I feel about Jon.

PS. I'm particularly sorry for Walleris and Seb, who will both probably suffer from severe pain on their stomach muscles after laughing at another naive and overly optimistic post made by that same old naive and overly optimistic fan, who's been shamelessly attempting to interrupt their analogies for the last couple of years...

[Panda]

Or Jon is just touring until he can afford to buy an NFL team. Having no Richie is good, because he would have to pay Phil considerably less.

[symbeline]

Stop the presses. When did this turn into a Jon regained his voice VS No he didn't

He hasn't. He won't. He might sound better than his worse 2013 but that's because you can actually understand what he says. But even 2013 semi-decent levels are absolutely unattainable. He can (and should) only improve his stage presence. When he did it for a couple of shows it made a huge difference for a lot of people, myself included, and made the songs bearable. But his voice is finished. Singing a good note here and there or even stringing a few decent songs together in the same night when the rest is dreadful is not a sign of improvement.

And what's up with the wishful thinking “I wish they did acoustic songs, I wish this and that rare songs were played” Do you realize that Jon would butcher those even worse because they are outside his comfort zone (he can't go through the motions of singing them every night)? Singing acoustic requires an attitude, a power behind the voice that has nothing to do with high notes but everything to do with having a good voice otherwise it would be plain boring. Same with anything they are not playing regularly. Any rocker would turn into a shout fest, any uptempo song would be a mix between whispered verses with missing words and shouted chorus and any ballad, well, there's the one he did in NYE as proof.

I'm all for listening to anything different, but it's naive to think that an easy song would automatically fix things. I love/like 80% of THINFS and after the promo shows I was hopeful that the live version would be solid, hearing real instruments and such. But they only got worse. They drag on and on. And that's his comfort zone, those are songs engineered for what's left of his voice. And I can count decent performances of any of them with the fingers of one hand.

[BJFan99]

Originally Posted by symbeline

Stop the presses. When did this turn into a Jon regained his voice VS No he didn't

He hasn't. He won't. He might sound better than his worse 2013 but that's because you can actually understand what he says. But even 2013 semi-decent levels are absolutely unattainable. He can (and should) only improve his stage presence. When he did it for a couple of shows it made a huge difference for a lot of people, myself included, and made the songs bearable. But his voice is finished. Singing a good note here and there or even stringing a few decent songs together in the same night when the rest is dreadful is not a sign of improvement.

And what's up with the wishful thinking “I wish they did acoustic songs, I wish this and that rare songs were played” Do you realize that Jon would butcher those even worse because they are outside his comfort zone (he can't go through the motions of singing them every night)? Singing acoustic requires an attitude, a power behind the voice that has nothing to do with high notes but everything to do with having a good voice otherwise it would be plain boring. Same with anything they are not playing regularly. Any rocker would turn into a shout fest, any uptempo song would be a mix between whispered verses with missing words and shouted chorus and any ballad, well, there's the one he did in NYE as proof.

I'm all for listening to anything different, but it's naive to think that an easy song would automatically fix things. I love/like 80% of THINFS and after the promo shows I was hopeful that the live version would be solid, hearing real instruments and such. But they only got worse. They drag on and on. And that's his comfort zone, those are songs engineered for what's left of his voice. And I can count decent performances of any of them with the fingers of one hand.

Sad to say, but you hit the nail right on the head.

I'm more and more turning from an optimist into a pessimist regarding my faith in Jon as a performer and especially as a singer. On one hand, I'll be extremely happy if he managed to sustain the energy he showed in Rio and Sao Paulo even semi-regularly this year, but on the other hand, after reading all these statements, I realized he probably won't. I guess it's pretty safe to assume that there's more of shit like this to come:

https://youtu.be/-ixPjmh4PdE

Please, somebody, post some vids of Bon Jovi at their peak for the sake of my mental stability. I'm about to burst into tears once again...

PS. Dominik, don't you dare to pick on me and my thoughts about JBJ this time, or I'll come and force you to watch the Dusseldorf 2011 show five times in a row with no piss breaks in between! Actually, to make things worse, I'll put the video onto 0.25 speed on the last round and tie you to a kitchen chair, break your throne & cut your hair at the same time...

[DavetheGodofKeys]

Bon Jovi - Living In Sin (Rotterdam 1989) -...

Legendary performance and definitely the best of Living In Sin. Near the end on the high screams I think Jon goes even higher than the album version! Oh man, it's heartbeaking to see what he could to back then and to see now now he struggles on Who Says, Rollercoaster...

[DavetheGodofKeys]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=1575s&v=rImCaB_Srek

Great concert with some of the best versions of Dry County and BOR ever! Amazing energy and I believe that Apri was the peak for the band in terms of live performances!