Keep the Faith
Bon Jovi
How to study this song
The card for “Keep the Faith” is built from 74 study entries at A2: 25 English words, 7 adjectives and 42 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: mother, father and children are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 42 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mother | madre | madre | mère | mãe | moeder | Mutter |
| father | padre | padre | père | pai | vader | Vater |
| children | hijos, niños | figli, bambini | enfants | filhos, crianças | kinderen | Kinder, Söhne und Töchter |
| son | hijo | figlio | fils | filho |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2
- Vocabulary words
- 25
- Adjectives
- 7
- Word combos
- 6
- Expressions
- 18
- Verb forms
- 42
- Quiz questions
- 35
More English songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Keep the Faith» is the title track and first single of Bon Jovi’s fifth studio album. The single was released on 7 October 1992 by Mercury Records, almost a month before the album, which followed on 3 November 1992. It was the first new music the band had put out as a group since «New Jersey» in 1988, and it sounded different from much of what had made them famous in the 1980s. The song was written by Jon Bon Jovi and the guitarist Richie Sambora together with Desmond Child, the songwriter who had already worked with them on some of their biggest hits.
The years before the record were the most uncertain in the band’s history. After the long world tour that followed «New Jersey» in 1988 and 1989, the five musicians were exhausted and stopped working together. Jon Bon Jovi wrote and recorded the soundtrack for the western «Young Guns II» in 1990, and Richie Sambora released a solo album. Many people assumed the group was finished. Jon also fired the band’s long-time manager, Doc McGhee, and set up his own company, Bon Jovi Management. In October 1991 the band met on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to talk about the future and decided to make another record.
That record was produced by Bob Rock and recorded between January and August 1992 at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, Canada. By then the music scene had changed. Grunge bands from Seattle, led by Nirvana, had made the glossy hard rock of the previous decade look old-fashioned almost overnight. Years later Jon Bon Jovi said that the band simply shut the door and ignored what was happening to their kind of music; instead, they dropped the clichés, wrote lyrics with a social conscience and cut their hair. The long hair of the 1980s was gone, and the new image became part of the story of the album.
The lyric is written as a series of confessions. At the start the singer speaks to his mother and his father: he admits that anger has cost him dearly, that some wars cannot be won, and he promises to stop fighting and asks to be forgiven. The chorus widens the view to everybody: people need someone to love and someone to hate, the times are hard, and it is easy to feel that there is nobody to rely on. Against all that, the title works as a promise to survive the bad weather without letting love turn sour. The last verse is the darkest part of the song, with a narrator who hides his tears from the world and carries mistakes he cannot undo.