He really was living on a prayer.
Jon Bon Jovi admitted that he needed a lot of convincing that his band’s hit 1986 song “Livin’ on a Prayer” could go the distance after hearing it for the first time.
The rocker, 62, said he “wasn’t that impressed” with the iconic track when it was first written, but admitted that ultimately he “was wrong” about the song’s longevity.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to record it, but I wasn’t all that impressed on the day that we wrote it,” the Grammy winner told People.
“It was the simple chord progression, the melodies and the lyrics [at first]. But the bass line came to life in the demo studio, when we took it back to the band and worked it up. That’s how it became what it is.”
“We knew what we wanted, we just didn’t have it, and so I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s good. Good day. Good day at the office,’ and I was wrong. It’s one of the biggest songs in our catalogue,” the Bon Jovi frontman added.
The song ultimately became one of the band’s most famous hits which charted at the top of the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.
It’s since been certified triple platinum for over 3 million digital global downloads.
What’s more, the rocker admitted that he wasn’t too keen on the band’s hit 1994 track “Always,” either.
“When I’d written that, we demoed it for a movie, that I had written it for, and thought, ‘Yeah, that’s not very good,’” he said.
“Put it on the shelf, and an A+R guy, who was a friend of ours, was listening to some of those lost songs, and he said, ‘You know, this is a monster hit.’ He was right,” he told the outlet, adding that it’s since become “one of our biggest songs ever.”
The 1994 power ballad went on to sell over a million copies in the US, and more than 3 million globally.
It comes as the rocker revealed that he hasn’t always “been a saint” throughout his over three-decades-long marriage to wife Dorothea.
The “You Give Love a Bad Name” hitmaker and his wife are gearing up to celebrate their 35th anniversary next week, but the rocker admits that they wouldn’t have reached the milestone had it not been for his wife’s “tolerance.”