Somgoftheday 10/26/19 - I should have seen it coming when the roses died, should have seen the end of summer in your eyes...

"This Ain't A Love Song" - Bon Jovi
from the album These Days (1995)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #14 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 13

Today's song of the day comes from New Jersey's own Bon Jovi, who we had last seen recapping their career so far with a hits collection that also saw their bass player Alec John Such leave the band. As a testament to the changing atmosphere of the music scene, the new lead single from the collection, "Always", climbed to #4 on both the pop and adult contemporary charts at the end of 1994, but didn't even scratch the rock radio tally at all. The following year the band came back with their sixth studio album These Days, their first with new bassist Hugh McDonald (at that time not an "official" member yet). The first release from the record would be the downtempo ballad "This Ain't A Love Song". Written by lead singer Jon Bon Jovi, guitarist Richie Sambora, and song doctor Desmond Child, the track definitely continued the band's "softening" to attempt to evolve (to maybe an older audience?)...

"This Ain't A Love Song" racked up another top-40 hit for the band, but surprisingly it stalled short of the top ten on the Hot 100 in August of 1995. The song also climbed to #22 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") radio chart, but missed the rock radio lists completely. Internationally, though, the song was a much bigger hit, topping the singles list in Finland, reaching the top ten in Canada (#2), the Netherlands (#3), Iceland (#3), Australia (#4), Switzerland (#4), Ireland (#5), the UK (#6), Austria (#6), France (#8), Belgium (#8W/#11F), Norway (#8), Germany (#9), and Poland (#9).

In the U.S., the next single from These Days would be the "double-sided" single "Something For The Pain" and "Lie To Me". Both received pop airplay enough to be listed on the chart, but the former track stalled at #76 while "Lie To Me" only got to #88, both a huge disappointment for the red-hot band of the late 1980s. However, both songs were much, much more successful internationally even when released separately, with "Something For The Pain" making the top ten in Finland (#4), the UK (#8), Ireland (#8), and Switzerland (#10), and "Lie To Me" reaching that level in Finland (#9), the UK (#10), and Switzerland (#10). The fourth single release, "These Days", scored yet a fourth top ten British hit at #7, while the fifth, "Hey God", got to #13 in the UK and #18 in Finland. Meanwhile, the These Days album went to #1 all over the world, proving those years would come to be Bon Jovi as the biggest international act in the world...

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Here's the band live in 1995 at Wembley Stadium in London...