Sometimes, everyone involved can spot a hit as soon as it’s written, but on other occasions, it takes a while for the penny to drop.
Take Bon Jovi’s Livin’ A Prayer, for example, which Desmond Child – who wrote it with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora for 1986’s Slippery When Wet album – tells Elmo Lovano was a case in point. Its genius was revealed in stages, and sometimes by accident, and Jon Bon Jovi himself wasn’t convinced by it until fairly late in the piece.
It was him who came up with the original concept, though: “Jon came in saying, ‘I want to write a song about a struggling working-class couple,’” says Child. “And later on he said that he had friends of his that had married in high school, Bonnie and Joe, that had a very difficult time, so that's what was on his mind.”
This made Child think of an experience of his own: “I had in mind that period of time when I lived with Maria [Vidal, singer], and we were starting [pop band] Desmond Child & Rouge, and she worked at a little diner where the waitresses sang, and her waitress name was Gina Velvet, because she reminded everybody of Gina Lollobrigida.
“So that's why, when we first started writing the song, I suggested Johnny and Gina, because it has an alliteration, because I work a lot with alliteration, and Jon said ‘I can't sing that, my name's Jon. Everybody will think I'm singing about myself.’ And we're all like ‘Johnny… Tommy.. What about Tommy? And Tommy and Gina were born.”
Getting the cast list together was just the start of the process, though – after a first attempt at writing the song, Child reveals that he had to convince Jon Bon Jovi that he was 'only halfway there' and to make a pretty significant change to the song’s arrangement. In fact, he told him that the chorus they’d written wasn’t going to be the chorus at all.
“The ‘We've gotta hold on’ was the first chorus,” he recalls. “And Jon was happy with that, and I said, ‘No, no, no, that's just the B section. Let's write the chorus now.’”
And so that chorus became the pre-chorus and the famous ‘Whoa, we're halfway there;
Whoa oh, livin' on a prayer’ refrain was born. The screaming melody for the second ‘whoa-oh’, though, was struck upon by chance via Richie Sambora.
“Richie was searching for a harmony [to what was originally written], and Richie went, ‘Whoa-oh’, which was the harmony to the melody that we were singing,” says Child. “And it was like, ‘wait a second, that's the melody.’”
Despite these bumps in the road, with everyone contributing, Child remembers the writing process as a “beautiful collaboration,” but because it began with Child sitting at an upright piano, Jon Bon Jovi had to be convinced that the song was right for him and his band.
“Jon still thought that, because I'd written it on the piano, it was piano driven,” says Child. “And he was a guitar band and all that – he thought, ‘this isn't gonna work.’ But Richie and I knew what we had, and at another writing session we got on our hands and knees, literally, and begged him to at least try it.”
In the end, Bon Jovi agreed to record it, but it sounds like it was under a certain amount of duress.
“He didn't like it, you know, and then they went in the studio with genius producer Bruce Fairbairn, and they made it come to life.”
Did he like it then? “I think so. He’s still singing it,” Child quips.
Child wasn’t in the studio when Livin’ On A Prayer was recorded – in fact, he didn’t hear the finished version until after Slippery When Wet’s release.
“I actually heard it again, like, in a cab or something,” he says. “It was like, ‘Oh my god – that really sounds great.’
A lot of people seemed to agree: Livin' On A Prayer was a US number one, and is approaching three billion streams on Spotify.
If you want to have a crack at the song yourself, Bon Jovi are currently asking fans to submit videos of themselves singing it so that they can be shown on the big screen during their upcoming Forever tour shows.
Not that it’s an easy song to sing, of course; in fact, it gets even trickier for the outro chorus, when there’s a significant key change. Again, Child says that this was his idea – as were the decisions to remove a drum fill and take a beat off the bar that precedes it.
“I had suggested the modulation, but not a half step or not a whole step,” he says. “I think it's like a minor third up [it is], which made it like, ‘wow’, and I also suggested to cut the bar there into a bar of three, and that becomes ‘one’ instead of an anticipation.”
