Best Bon Jovi Song

Bon Jovi have released singles in five different decades, which is the whole problem with picking one. The band that made Runaway was a hungry bar act with keyboards; the band that made Livin' on a Prayer two years later had figured out how to fill a stadium and never really unlearned it. Every single the band put out under its own name is on this ballot, so the fight is not only between songs, it is between five or six different versions of the same group.

The Slippery When Wet and New Jersey stretch is where most arguments start and stop. You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer and Wanted Dead or Alive came out inside a year of each other, with Bad Medicine and I'll Be There for You right behind them. Anything from before or after has to beat that run from a standing start.

What makes the bracket interesting is that plenty of it does. Keep the Faith and These Days are darker and more carefully written than the hits that made the band famous, It's My Life dragged the talkbox into a completely different decade, and the Lost Highway material went to Nashville without flinching. Then there is Always, written for a film almost nobody saw, which somehow ended up as the song people name first.

Sources are split three ways, and you can hear why. Songs that got a clip in the MTV years use that clip, because the picture is half of what people are remembering. Later singles come from the band's own channel. Burning for Love and Bounce never had a video made, so the album recording fills those two slots.