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Bryan Adams Looks Back At Reckless 30 Years Later

11/07/2014
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(Radio.com) For this edition of Single Again, Radio.com spoke to Bryan Adams, the best-selling Canadian artist of all time, about his 1984 breakthrough album Reckless, which spawned six charting singles, a feat only matched at the time by Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A.. Reckless will be released in a 4-disc 30th anniversary edition on November 10.

Radio.com: How does it feel to reach the 30th anniversary of Reckless? Bryan Adams: Well, I've kind of already had one with Cuts Like a Knife and You Want It, You Got It and the first album, so this one was more significant in the sense that this album changed a lot. In that it got me out of the sh*tty clubs and into the better s-- clubs.

What was different about going into the studio to make Reckless than on the albums before it? I guess there was a perpetual motion that was happening for years before we made Reckless. We went on a lot of tours and it was just a treadmill of "tour, write, record, tour, write, record." I had a good team, good songs, Jim Vallance [Adams' co-writer] Bob Clearmountain [producer], a good band, pretty well-rehearsed. So we were all thinking the same thing at the same time about making a great record. The songs were all there, so there wasn't a reason why we weren't thinking about getting out of the clubs.

I was thinking of all the places in my setlist, 'I need a rocker here, a slow number here, something midtempo here and maybe something with a guitar solo here,' so I tailored my set full of songs I needed. I'd say, "Jim, I need a shuffle." So we'd sit down and write a shuffle. Sometimes a song was written to order-like "Heaven," which was written for a really crappy film [A Night in Heaven], I don't mind telling you, it was about a stripper-it was inspiring enough to create a good song. It doesn't matter where the inspiration comes from, if you've got a good one then it's worth going down that road.

What was it like to work with Tina Turner on "It's Only Love?" It was just the last couple weeks before we were finishing the record, and we heard she was coming to Vancouver. If you could imagine, she was the support act for Lionel Richie. And I sent the song to her manager, who said 'yeah, let's meet up when we get to Vancouver.' And we're backstage, a lot of people back there, and I hear this like, "Where is he? Where is he?" This big mane of hair coming down the hallway backstage at the Collosseum and she says "Brian, I love the song. I want to record it tomorrow." It was one of those moments like you're in a dust storm, and it goes away and you're like, wow, what happened. I said to Clearmountain just after she recorded and left, "Did you get that? Did you get that on tape? Let me hear that, man." I couldn't quite believe it actually. It was an interesting time, because she had just recorded Private Dancer but it wasn't out yet. She took me under her wing and next thing you know, we were on tour and we never looked back.

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Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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