And someone better call Dashboard Confessional about the bridge: “Your clothes are still scattered all over our room / This whole place still smells like your cheap perfume.” “Baby I want you, like the roses want the rain!” Jon Bon Jovi shrieks, for what won’t be the last instance of rose imagery on 1992’s Keep the Faith, and he follows it with an even more emo killer: “You know I need you / Like a poet needs the pain!” And if you thought it couldn’t get even more skyward from there, in crashes the chorus built on the same chord progression as “Don’t Stop Believin’” (to which Bon Jovi winks, maybe unknowingly, “I still believe” at one point). Here’s an expensive-sounding ode to celebrating one’s haggardness, and, of course, it comes with a hook. Fittingly, Jon compares himself to a pair of torn blue jeans, even if the kind his band conjures up is a pre-ripped $100 pair from Urban Outfitters.
So “I like the bed I’m sleeping in / It’s just like me, it’s broken in” implores fans to relate to the perception that their idols grow up with them. Crush was the perfect definition of a comeback album, and Bon Jovi’s world-weary, Springsteen-esque self-consciousness couldn’t allow him to avoid including a track defending why they’re still here. In which Jon Bon Jovi beats Jay-Z to “30 Something” by six years or so.