Artist: Bon Jovi
Album: This Left Feels Right
Like many other fans of the band, I don’t really care for This Left Feels Right. However, I do have the CD in my collection, mostly for the sake of completeness. In this case, the slowed-down and mellowed out treatment that this song received did not do it any favors, so far as I’m concerned. It lost all of the emotional power in the original song.
The chorus of this song suffers the most. This ballad-ish treatment robs the chorus of all of the anguish and passion that was invested in the vocals of the original version of the song. This version, by contrast, just seems flat. The words and the delivery don’t match at all. Also, one of the other things that is conspicuously lost in TLFR is the build of the song. The original actually doesn’t start off all that differently–but it builds gloriously to the chorus. In this version, there’s no build at all.
The third verse doesn’t fare well here either–once again, the emotion is completely lacking. I think they were trying for a more regretful tone, but it just comes off flat to me. Also, the hummed last verse of this version doesn’t work for me. It just feels like the end of the song is being dragged out past its expiration date.
All told, this is one of the reasons that I really didn’t like This Left Feels Right. The original ‘Bed of Roses’ is one of my favorite Bon Jovi songs, and I’ve always felt that this version just stripped all of the passion from the song.
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