“Rock is alive”: Five takeaways from Bon Jovi’s London event ahead of 2026 stadium tour
In 2024, Jon Bon Jovi had no idea whether he’d tour again.
“It’s up to God at this point. I’ve done everything I can do,” he said. His vocal cords had failed him, resulting in surgery in 2022, with the road to recovery being arduous and seemingly endless.
It was only this spring that things started looking up, according to the rock vocalist. With flowers in new bloom, the New Jersey rocker, with a whopping 18 albums in his discography, felt confident that he finally would be able to perform again, and he wasn’t about to do it in half measures.
The band’s new record, Forever (Legendary Edition), has also been released on October 24th. In the spirit of revival, it features re-workings of songs from their 2024 album, Forever, with a series of special guests including Bruce Springsteen, Jelly Roll, Avril Lavigne, Lainey Wilson, Robbie Williams, and more.
Next year, Bon Jovi will play a night a Wembley Stadium, as well as four nights at Madison Square Garden in New York. They’ll hit the Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh and Croke Park in Dublin, too.
On the day of the album’s release, Bon Jovi rides the tube. Only a minute or two late, he saunters into a back room in Wembley Stadium, where he last played in 2019. He is full of joy and reflective gratitude, even quipping to the barrage of cameramen, “Oh, how I’ve missed you.”
Over the next 30 minutes, the star shed light on his vocal recovery, the collaborations at the heart of the new record, as well as his thoughts on the enduring appeal of rock and roll.
“I didn’t lose faith”: Bon Jovi’s long road back to vocal recovery
Bon Jovi has often candidly explained his reaction to losing his voice. “If I can’t be great, I’m out,” he once said. The band’s legacy simply meant too much to him. It’s a sentiment he expressed again at Wembley, sharing, “I don’t think that I ever lost faith, but I had no idea that the recovery from this throat surgery was gonna be three and a half years. So it’s just been much longer than anticipated.”
The rock icon then praised his surgeon for doing “an incredible job”, but revealed that the process has taken so long that his surgeon is now retired. Despite this, he’s given Bon Jovi the all-clear to return to the stage.
A part of Bon Jovi admitted that he expected their return to the stage to happen alongside their 2024 album, Legendary. He admitted, “As the record was coming out and we started to rehearse, I just wasn’t up to the standard that we’re accustomed to. There was no way that I would go. So I had to pull the plug, and therefore pull the plug on a very joyous record, one that I really wanted to go out and share.”
Bon Jovi gives love to “older brother” Bruce Springsteen
One of the most anticipated releases on the new collaborative album was ‘Hollow Man’, featuring fellow New Jersey musician Bruce Springsteen. The ‘Born in the USA’ singer is enjoying the limelight on his own at the moment, due to the newly released biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, featuring Jeremy Allen White.
Bon Jovi was happy to discuss his relationship with the singer, sharing, “We’re very close friends. He’s like a brother, like an older brother. He knew of these songs because we’ve often played each other’s songs throughout the years, and we take these now famous drives, and we were playing each other music, and I remember on ‘Hollow Man’, for instance, he called me back the next day after hearing it down, and said, you know, that’s a very special song.”
Springsteen’s initial eagerness made the collaboration a whole lot smoother. He continued, “So it was easier a year later to say we’ve never recorded together… Remember how much you love ‘Hollow Man’? Why don’t you do that? So it was really wonderful to do it.”
Bon Jovi was infinitely pleased with the result, humbly stating, “You know, I think that Bruce just took a magnifying glass to my storytelling. It’s the same thing. It’s just better.”
Working with Avril Lavigne and “strong-voiced women”
The new Bon Jovi release is an eclectic mix of re-imaginings that spin through both country and rock influences. In this way, Bon Jovi is influenced by everything: He even visited Wembley Stadium to watch Taylor Swift perform in 2024, as well as spectating the Oasis return in New Jersey. He thanked the latter for, in part, revitalising stadium rock: “There was a time ten, 12 years ago that I used to hear people say, ‘Rock is dead’. I think rock is alive and well again.”
Another artist who has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years is Avril Lavigne. Though he wasn’t in the studio with Lavigne for their new collaboration, he deemed the star “fabulous”, adding, “We needed a big powerful voice.” The ‘Complicated’ vocalist was “very eager to do it, and [the band] needed someone that was going to bring that energy.”
Lavigne was deemed a perfect fit for the new version of ‘Living in Paradise’, and the choice also spoke to the band’s wider intention to include “guys and girls internationally known as well as domestically.”
According to Bon Jovi, the band wanted “old relationships, new relationships, country as well as rock. We had her and Lainey Wilson, and then, of course, The War on Treaty. We wanted gals on it, and strong-voiced women.”
Gratitude, loyalty, and sharing the light
Bon Jovi’s road to recovery has been long and painful, but it’s never been lonely. He praised the team around him, saying, “It was really incredible. My gratitude is deep for the band, the crew, you know, everybody that was there through the process and just wouldn’t let me down and wouldn’t let me quit. And so it’s a deep gratitude that it’s here with the band, the crew, the fan base, because they understand that this is a tour of gratitude.”
He stressed that fans, too, are central to the band’s return. Musing on his position as a performer, he shared, “If I get to, metaphorically speaking, hold the light, then the band powers the light, and the audience gets the beam of that light, and I get to stand in the reflection. If we get to share light, that will bring me joy. I’m not chasing the new pop act. You know, our legacy is what it is. So to me, it is truly gratitude and joy and this amazing catalogue of music that a lot of people embraced.”
He may have been out of the limelight, but Bon Jovi hasn’t allowed himself much time off from performing, despite his silence for the past several years. In fact, he’s been rehearsing four nights a week for the last three-and-a-half years to “an audience of me and I” with the rest of the band joining him once a month, which has helped seal their grand return in 2026.
The future of Bon Jovi beyond 2026
Bon Jovi played their first full show since 2022 in May this year. It was a private, intimate show at the Marathon Music Works, a fan club in Nashville. Bon Jovi admitted that he “felt great about that,” adding that the band had “just shot something down in West Palm Beach, Florida, where it’ll come out soon, on television.”
He sang eight songs easily, proof that he could really take to the stage again with everything he had. Though we only have a sprinkle of dates, the announcement indicates they’ll again be touring in full swing in the future.
However, Bon Jovi gave a reflective, yet cryptic, answer: “I’m not thinking about the future of the outcomes. I’m really just being right here right now, and that’s all that I care about. The rest of it happens, great, but it’s not about numbers and tomorrows.” Indeed.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Music Newsletter
All the latest music news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.