It's My Life

Jon Bon Jovi came home from filming U-571 to find "It's My Life" waiting to be finished. The song, released on May 8, 2000 as the lead single from the band's seventh album Crush, was written by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Max Martin, with Luke Ebbin co-producing. It carried plenty of familiar hallmarks, including Sambora's talk box, and name-checked Tommy and Gina, the fictional working class couple the pair had first written about in their 1986 single "Livin' on a Prayer." Another lyric compared Jon Bon Jovi's heart to an open highway and invoked Frank Sinatra, a line Sambora objected to on the grounds that nobody cared about Sinatra. Jon Bon Jovi wrote it anyway, reasoning that Sinatra had made sixteen movies and toured until he was eighty, making him a role model.

The single went to number one in Austria, Flanders, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland, and reached number 33 on the US Billboard Hot 100. It became the band's biggest hit since the 1980s. Jon Bon Jovi later admitted he had written it self-indulgently about his own life and was surprised when teenagers, mechanics, and older listeners all took the phrase as their own.

The music video, directed by Wayne Isham, starred Will Estes as Tommy and Shiri Appleby as Gina, with Estes running through Los Angeles to reach a concert in a plot inspired by the film Run Lola Run. Jon Bon Jovi had met Estes on the set of U-571 and picked him for the role. The video won Video of the Year at the VH1 My Music Awards.