“Livin' on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi

"Livin' on a Prayer" came off Bon Jovi's third album, Slippery When Wet, late in 1986, and it's pop-metal built to the scale of a stadium. Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child wrote it, Bruce Fairbairn produced it, and Bob Rock engineered and mixed it into something enormous. Sambora's talkbox growls through it, David Bryan's keyboards shimmer overhead, and Alec John Such and Tico Torres drive it like a getaway car, with the whole band piling onto the backing vocals.

It worked on rock radio and pop radio alike, MTV played the video to death, and it gave the band a second straight chart-topper on the Hot 100 and their first on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. It's the song Bon Jovi are known by, and it has kept selling for decades, past 13 million copies worldwide.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.