Songwriter's Corner|

Jon Bon Jovi washing dishes at the Soul Kitchen in Red Bank on March 18, 2020.

By Lee Cowan, CBS Sunday Morning | It’s been a while since we’ve seen Jon Bon Jovi solo. But with touring at a halt, and his new album release postponed until Fall, he’s spending a lot of his time at his non-profit JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants in New Jersey, as an essential worker, helping cook take-out for the hungry.

His wife, Dorothea, took this picture of him recently doing the dishes:

“She said, ‘What should the caption be?’ And I said, ‘If you can’t do what you do, do what you can,” Bon Jovi said.

The next day, that caption became a chorus … and the chorus a song.

“[I] carefully presented it to my audience, which was my family!” he laughed. “And hoped that they liked it enough that I wanted to share it with others. Because, you know, I was proud of it.”

Correspondent Lee Cowan asked, “Does it feel like you’re more, I don’t know, creative maybe isn’t the right word. But there’s something there, right?”

“There’s something there. And I realized that it was something that we are all going through. No matter who you are, no matter where you live on this planet, we experience COVID-19 together.

The COVID music muse has tapped a lot of bands on the shoulder recently. The Rolling Stones hadn’t released an original song in eight years, until this one: “Living in a Ghost Town,” complete with a video featuring a fish-eyed view of empty streets, screamed the headlines of our times:

You can look for me
But I can’t be found
You can search for me
I had to go underground
Life was so beautiful
Then we all got locked down
Feel a like ghost
Living in a ghost town, yeah

Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande captured the other pandemic’s signature – our endless posting of selfies in quarantine – in “Stuck With U,” a video musical chat.

And if that’s not enough of a mirror on our lives, there’s the upbeat COVID collaboration of Michael Bublé, Barenaked Ladies and Sofia Reyes, who remind us all we just “Gotta Be Patient.”

But now there’s almost a new genre blossoming that some are calling “Pandemic Pop.” Like Luke Combs’ “Six Feet Apart”…
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Story produced by Deirdre Cohen. Editor: Ed Givnish.
© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Read and/or watch the whole story here – some really cool videos to it:
htps://www.cbsnews.com/news/songs-for-our-times-a-covid-19-playlist/

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