Interpretation - Last man standing

'Last man standing' is a song about the music business and all that belongs to this topic. Jon wrote about its change over the past years that they had been in the business and how hard it was for him personally to accept this change. He couldn't believe that not the real bands were relevant anymore, those who write their own songs, play their music live and grew up in garage bands that played local clubs, but more and more 'artists' like DJs, boybands or casting bands that never write their songs by themselves, got computers and technology to produce the music and became famous more by mistake than by hard work or being talented.

He asked himself: 'Who is going to be the next Bob Dylan?' and came to the idea of the last real musician sitting in a circus tent and playing his music for the people standing around him and staring at him. In front of the tent, there's a man saying the first lines of the song: 'Come see a living, breathing spectacle only seen right here, it's your last chance in this lifetime' and then ' you won't believe your eyes, your eyes will not believe your ears'.

Actually, the song was musically a lot darker than the reworked version on 'Have a nice day' because it deals with a really serious and sad topic in Jon's opinion.

Moreover, he seems to think that people don't care about all this, don't even see the change and behave like little children who don't know a certain situation, as we can see in different parts of the song as for example: 'You ain't seen nothing like him, he's the last one of the breed', 'It might change the way you think, there's no dancers, there's no diamonds, no this boy don't lyp-synch' and 'It breaks your heart to hear him sing, the songs were more than music, they were pictures from the soul, so keep your pseudo-punk, hip-hop, pop-rock junk and your digital downloads'. This last quote shows another change that Jon couldn't really understand. Why do people have to download singular songs? For him, an album is an artwork. He spends a lot of time not for 'only' writing and producing the music, but also to find a good selection of songs, fitting running order and special cover photo. People seem to ignore all this and it becomes more and more usual to only download single songs that are currently in the charts.

Something very unusual for Bon Jovi is to sing about fears or insecurity, but in 'Last man standing' seems to be a little part where we could say that it is about fear or at least a little insecurity: 'I don't know where it's going, we all know where it's been'.

So, let's see what the future music industry produces and how it will look like in some years, but let's say it honestly: the real rockstar dies out.