With his new album Get Up hitting stores today, Bryan Adams decodes some of his favourite tracks from the lineup
Thunderbolt
So this is my thunderbolt guitar and it was done for a photo session that I was working on and I never actually used it for years, it’s just more like a prop than anything else. But I loved the idea of thunderbolt, I thought it will be great..thorough for an album and so we wrote the song and then it’s not there. So, it was like collecting stamps or something for about three years for making this record.
It was probably the easiest record ever that we have made. I have tried working with Jeff lynne. I just called him up and asked him to come around when near lA next to me so that we can have a cup of tea. So, which is what I did. Towards the end of the meeting I thought maybe when these guys get back to their work, so I left the studio where they were working and Jeff came up to me and said, “Hey do you fancy doing a song sometime togetherIJ You know it can be kind of track or somethingIJ” I was like “Yaah! I would love to.”
You Belong to me
One of the songs that we have had that Jim and I had written was You belong to me. I sent it to Jeff and I sent him a demo and he said that’s great. Can you send me the whole demoIJ So, I sent the whole demo over and then didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks.
Then I had happened to be back in lA and I said “How’s it goingIJ” And he said “Ohh! Good thing you called. Come on up and have a listen.” And so I came up and that was the first track recorded for the record.
I got very excited of course because I certainly heard my demo in a whole other way I’d keep taken. A really sort of basic demo recording of me singing a song and turned into a record. I let a couple of weeks go by and phoned him and said, “You think you should do another song and he said maybe it will be nice and then I said ok whenever you have got time.” That basically was what happened for two years.
Get Up
The album is called Get up because it happens to occur lyrically in the couple of places in the record and it occurs in That’s Rock And Roll, that’s the name of the song.
Brand New Day
The first line of the song which is Get up in a Party Till We Start It and then it occurs again in the song Brand New Day. It was thoughtsome whether the song was going to be called Get Up or whether it is going to be called a Brand New Day and it became Brand New Day, but it could be, Get Up, It’s A Brand New Day.
We did it all
This was a song that was tailor written for our producer Jeff lynne. And then one night I was just by myself sitting there and put the idea on and the first thing that came off my mouth was We Did It All and the chords build up comes after that sort of C over B flat chord which ends the verse and then I thought it was nice to keep holding on to the C so that the chords should end on the C chord but then B flat but then it goes onto the C chord, so it’s like a prolonged C, that to me gave the song some tension.
About the album
I wanted to try and make it narrative through the songs. All of the songs on the album were written with Jim Vallance except one which was written by myself and Jeff lynne or and there was another that was written by Jim and by myself and Phil Thornalley.
So during that time, Jim and I would sit down and we would create songs that we thought it will be cool for the record that either fit with what we already had or there might be something you know we were trying to make sure that we were impressing our producer. So we wanted to make sure that we had songs written were really good and so we worked pretty hard.
There have been many times when I would send a song and get it back, I would notice that the songs had either been edited down or just definitely had a sort of punch, vibe to them. It sort of made the songs more concise and I think that’s a good way of putting the record and I think it’s a very short and sharp record and it’s very up.
There will be pretty big world tour that goes along with this album, so I want to get it out there and the best way to do that it is to getting out and playing live and get to the people.
The inspiration comes from the fact that I love to sing, I love the creation of music and how satisfying that is. Take the music, put it in your chord, and turn up the stereo and how wonderful that is. It takes you somewhere and that’s what music is.