Tracks of my years

‘The Ultimate Tour’ is your 19th concert tour, and all your Asia dates are in India. Long before other major international acts travelled to the subcontinent, you did. How and in what way does India continue to be special for you?

It’s always an adventure whenever I’ve been here. On my first trip to India in 1994, there were no cars to collect us, so my guitarist, Keith Douglas Scott, and I got into a taxi from the airport. The suspension was broken in the car, and so we leaned over the seat to watch where we were going. Along the way, we had to stop because an elephant had gone to sleep in the middle of the road. Welcome to India! That would not happen anywhere else in the world. This will be our fifth tour of India, and I’m not sure many artists from the West have done that.

Ultimate is your sixth compilation album. You’re looking at a body of work from 1980-2017: how have you learnt to pick what constitutes as a classic Bryan Adams song/songs through the ages, and what is it about those songs that make the cut, sometimes in more than one compilation album?

It was fun to put together, as it’s very much what I play live. There are, of course, many other songs I could have put in there, but there is only so much room on a CD.

Could you tell me about the two new tracks that you’ve recorded for Ultimate: Please stay and Ultimate Love. What inspired them?

In the song, Ultimate love, I write: Ain’t no winners when you’re dropping bombs. Why can’t we all just get along? I say yeah, we can make it happen, we can make it better. There’s just one world we gotta live together, I say yeah.

At the time of writing this, there was much ado about North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. It makes me sick that people in power always have to resort to threats of war.

You’re the master of high-recall hooks, especially in your love songs. What’s the hardest part of writing a love song? There’s just so much one has to do: create intimacy, lyrics that will resonate across ages, and still have a hook that will lend it an almost instant connection with listeners.

Ah, well if I knew the answer to that one, I’d be writing more of them! I just got lucky a couple of times. Songs are elusive but good ones are even more elusive. I have to say that I’m quite straightforward. Get the idea across in the first 30 seconds of a song, that’s always been my approach. The inspiration is the theme of getting out, or looking back on life, relationships, all of those themes seem to occur… luckily those themes seem to be with me still. I don’t really have writer’s block. I keep jotting ideas down and then when the time comes to make a song, I fish through them to see if anything lights a fire.

You’ve got 13 studio albums, six compilation albums, two soundtracks and four live albums. And a whopping 69 singles. What’s the ultimate goal for Bryan Adams?

As long as people are interested in the music, I’ll continue to perform. Motivation is the easy thing, it’s the time to do everything that is the difficult bit. There’s just not enough time!