The long wait is over — with Bon Jovi's 15th album, 2020, finally dropping five months after its original release date. Earlier this year, once the pandemic shut everything down, Jon Bon Jovi spoke to Yahoo, and gave a state of the union on the band's then-soon to be released album and scrapped live dates: “It's like a bad dream. I was going to release our new album on May 15th, and rehearsals were to begin this week. I was just going to do 20 arenas as a warm-up to promote the album, and then do the big stuff after that. Not only are the 20 shows postponed, but I don't know when they'll happen. And depending on what you read, none of us knows what's going to happen in the future.”
In the subsequent months, 2020 was reshaped to reflect the changes in America and around the world.
Jon Bon Jovi chatted about the new collection to USA Today and was asked if he set out to write a socially conscious album: “No, no. Typically, I'll have one or two songs that are socially conscious, whether it was 'Keep The Faith,' 'Dry County,' or 'Runaway'. Social consciousness was something I was aware of but wasn't making a career of. With this record, I was doing the usual. And then as the writing process took root, (the album) took on a whole different kind of gravitas with the latter songs that were written: 'Lower The Flag,' 'Let It Rain,' 'American Reckoning,' and 'Do What You Can.'”