#23 - My Guitar Lies Bleeding in My Arms

Artist: Bon Jovi
Album: These Days
Other Versions: None
Era: 90s "moody rock"

Lyrics

I think, although I haven't checked for sure, I've done more 90s songs than any other era yet. Even choosing arbitrarily like I do, my favorite era's obvious!

So you know that band with the big hair and the lavendar spandex, who sing about girls with bright red nails on their fingertips, who pumped their songs full of synth keyboards, who were the masters of fluff rock with no real substance?

This band kicks their ass. Just hardcore knock-down drag-out ass-kicking happening here.

When I first listened to this song - well, the whole album had the same effect, but this song in particular - I was absolutely blown away. This was right after I'd gotten the whole discography from SWW onward, and I was listening to it chronologically. Hard to believe the SWW/NJ band was the same as the band playing and singing this song.

It starts out low, deep, and quiet, with some really gorgeous lyrics. "Misery likes company / I like the way that sounds / Been tryin' to find the meaning / So I can write it down." A song about songwriting - not just about writing, but about writer's block - I love that idea.

I'll point out the lyrics to this song are probably my favorite Bon Jovi lyrics. It's all this gorgeous imagery and emotion and it's dark and powerful and just so good. "Looking at the window / It's such a long way down / I'd like to jump but I'm afraid to hit the ground".

I love stream-of-consciousness writing, whether it's poetry or prose or lyrics or whatever. It makes you feel like you're really there with the writer while it's happening, thus intensifying the emotion. BJ have always done an excellent job of making you feel what they're feeling - adding the stream-of-consciousness to make it even more intense is just sublime (second time in a row I've used "sublime" in an entry...take a drink).

The tone of the song, the instrumentation, adds so much to the lyrics. That's what the instrumentation should do in the best of songs - match and enhance the vocals and the emotion and make the whole experience even more. That's what it does here - it matches the way Jon's vocie stays low and quiet and deep the first two stanzas, then just sweeps you up in one of the most powerful choruses they've ever done, carries you along through the second verse (where you "get so numb sometimes I just feel the pain") and then drops you right back down to where Jon is planning to "smoke my last cigarette / Well, I'll turn out the light" and give up for now.

That chorus...wow. "I can't write a love song / The way I feel today / I can't sing no songs of hope / There's no one left to save / I can't fight these feelings / Burning in my veins / I send this song to you whoever you are / As my guitar lies bleeding in my arms". It changes a bit every time, there's a good chance the way I wrote it doesn't actually appear in the song and I just happened to piece together all my favorite parts. It's so powerful, completely takes you by surprise after the mellow, deep verses. And yet it stays dark and keeps the mood of the song.

This is some of the best writing done by Bon Jovi ever, and it's one of my absolute favorites. It's this gorgeous musical epic that manages to take you somewhere and yet leave you right where you started. I can't gush enough about how good this song is.

My Rating: 10/10

Edited 3/25/06: Added lyrics