Today’s card is:
The Ghost Album

Bon Jovi
May – July 1988
Recording Studio Vancouver Canada
or unknown demo recording location 1987-1988
🏟️ New Jersey album

🎛️🎶🎧->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKOymf1mhkw&t=441s

by YouTube channel hAnD90, uploaded 2nd April 2025.

Back Story 

1988 demos new jersey album

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Oh, THEBONJOVINEWJERSEYALBUM THEBONJOVINEWJERSEYALBUM THEBONJOVINEWJERSEYALBUM!
I ask of thee!
What could POSSIBLY have been more brilliant, more seductive, more the pinnacle 80s rock than Bon Jovi’s 1988 New Jersey album?!

The answer is of course TWO 1988 Bon Jovi New Jersey albums. 

Which is exactly what was forged, in the creative fires of the Little Mountain Sound Studios, Vancouver.
The same place where biggest-80s-rock-album Slippery When Wet had been recorded two years prior.

The band wanted this successor simply called “New Jersey” after their homestate, to be a double album.
December 1987 the band already had 30 demo songs.

But the record company didn’t want a double album, claiming the fans would not be prepared to invest that kind of money.
For context: in 1988 I would have been prepared to give my life for a new Bon Jovi record, and I was not the only 16 year old who thought that way!
So clearly the band was in the position they could have created anything they wanted, ask any price they wanted, and still have us screaming for more.
But okay.
Record companies, you know how it is.

Anyway!
What followed was one singular New Jersey album, and decades of rare recordings resurfacing in different shapes and sizes.
The band’s 2014 Deluxe edition from the album New Jersey is the most official, most complete version we have, of how this album would have sounded if the band had gotten their way and the album had been a double one.

Under the working title Sons of Beaches, recording took off.
And although I like to think that all songs had the honor of being performed at least once in the studio in Vancouver Canada, it is possible some versions were never brought into the studio.

But what we do know is that there are multiple versions, even from songs that never made it to the album!
In April 2025 hAnD90 on YouTube gave us a new interpretation of how Sons of Beaches (meaning: an alternative version to the New Jersey album) could have sounded.

The description box says:

“They’ve been around as part of the Sessions From The Vault demo bootleg collection and widely spread across the fan base and on YT. I think back in around 2011, my good friend Felipe Fontoura (some may remember his amazing acoustic Bon Jovi covers back in the day!) fine tuned the wobbly old tapes from this session and brought them up to the right speed and pitch. I slightly enhanced his work by balancing the instruments a bit more and refining some things”

This is your cue to click it, and let yourself be absolutely rocked (this is a f*ing promise!) by this jaw dropping alternative version of a double album that never existed in the first place.

🎛️🎶🎧->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKOymf1mhkw&t=441s
Bon Jovi | Sons Of Beaches | New Jersey Demo Tapes | Vancouver 1988
1hour 16min 28sec

The superb quality of their writing, music and OMG can we talk about Jon’s voice?!
Because of ALL of those things, and the crazy number of songs from this era, New Jersey will never stop being:
The Well That Keeps On Giving  

The Ghost Album

the card

The Ghost Album Card means you’ve been overpowered, most likely in the area of creativity. Capitalism and its henchmen have you in a chokehold, making you take your creative work back, or altering it.
They’re making you change the message, or cutting it in half.
Watering it down.

The power to create was given to you. The time has come to summon that same power to send the work into the world, exactly as it was intended.

Your call will be answered.

~Suzanne Beenackers
Rock Star Writer

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