Bryan Adams‘ music already screams nostalgia. Here are four songs from the 80s that will make you wish you were alive during one of his most successful eras.
“Heat Of The Night”
This one, written by Adams and Jim Vallance, was partially inspired by a trip to Berlin that the two of them took when the Berlin Wall was still up. You can definitely hear the influence of that political tension in the lyrics.
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“I was caught in the crossfire of a silent scream / Where one man’s nightmare is another man’s dream / Pull the covers up high and pray for the mornin’ light / Better leave it alone in the heat of the night.”
“Cuts Like A Knife”
Cuts Like A Knife, the album, helped Adams expand his audience to be a little bit broader. Through singles like this one, “Straight To The Heart”, and “This Time”, Adams found more mainstream success.
This was actually Adams’ first Top 20 hit on the Canadian Singles Chart. The music video for “Cuts Like A Knife”, which features an angry Adams fiddling around with a knife, of course, also did pretty well on MTV back in the day.
“Run To You”
Originally, “Run To You” wasn’t going to be a song on Adam’s 1984 album Reckless. He and Vallance actually wrote the song for Blue Öyster Cult, but the group turned it down. “Run To You” ended up being the album’s first single.
In this song, Adams compares two relationships. He explains to one of them his reasoning for choosing her at the end of the day.
“She’s got a heart of gold, she’d never let me down / But you’re the one that always turns me on / You keep me comin’ ’round.”
“Heaven”
There’s something otherworldly, no pun intended, about hearing this song for the first time. “Heaven” was written by Bryan Adams and Vallance, originally for a film, and ended up being a Gold-certified No. 1 single.
“That was a request from our publisher,” Vallance told Rediscover The 80s of this song. “They needed a song for a film called ‘A Night In Heaven’. They sent us a ‘rough cut’ to watch, but the storyline didn’t provide much inspiration for lyrics, so we pretty much grabbed the word ‘heaven’ and ran with that.”
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