Jon Bon Jovi wasn’t sure if his band would ever record another album. The Jersey rock icon, whose raspy vocals lifted his eponymous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band to global superstardom in the 1980s and 1990s with iconic hits such as “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and “It’s My Life,” chronicled his long, hard road back from vocal cord surgery in 2022 in the recent Hulu series "Thank You, Goodnight – The Bon Jovi Story." In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, he talked about how that scary career roadblock helped inspire the band’s new album, "Forever," which is out on Friday (June 7). “I went into this surgery and I had a lot of time on my hands — all I could really do was sit around and start to think about songs,” Bon Jovi told EW. “I started to feel joy again. And we — the collective we, who lived through COVID — we’d all come out of that fog, and we were interacting again. There was a new appreciation for life. And I was having this new appreciation for my body. And it led to all these songs.”

The result was a 12-track album recorded by Bon Jovi and bandmates keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, bassist Hugh McDonald, guitarist Phil X, percussionist Everett Bradley, and rhythm guitarist John Shanks, which the singer said the crew recorded in a brisk seven weeks. “Nothing was on delay. It just flowed,” Bon Jovi said of the album that features the soaring “Legendary” and talkbox-assisted “Living Proof,” which he wrote in just two days. Bon Jovi also dropped in for a chat with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show on Wednesday night (June 6), where he smiled and kept his secrets when the host asked what it was like to be “young and beautiful” on the road in the 1980s. “If I were to write a book it would be called, 'The Best Time I Never Had,'” the 62-year-old silver fox said with a grin, joking that he tells his children that he didn’t party and went straight home after shows.

Bon Jovi credited his bandmates with believing in his dream 40 years ago, saying that the new album got its name after he realized that “these songs are going to outlive us until long after we’re gone.” He noted that he’s “well on the road to recovery” from the vocal surgery chronicled in the four-part documentary series, joking that now was the time to commemorate the band’s 40th anniversary because he has no idea if he’ll be around for their 50th. During the double-segment sit-down, Bon Jovi bragged about the rest stop named after him in New Jersey and his early days working around the corner at the Power Station recording studio. One of his favorite memories from the time when he was a teenager “gofer,” he said, was when he watched David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing “Under Pressure” through the studio window. “I saw them sing that vocal,” he told an astonished Colbert.

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