Bryan Adams wasn’t planning on making an album when he first started collaborating with Jeff Lynne.
“It came together quite by chance,” Adams says of working with the Electric Light Orchestra leader for his latest record Get Up!, via phone from London, England.
“Although I’d known Jeff in the past, I’d wanted to work with him for years. Jim (Vallance, Adams’ longtime songwriting partner) and used to talk about how there were two or three producers that we both really admired, one was Mutt Lange and the other was Jeff Lynne. I just went to hang out with him one and day and he asked if I’d be up for doing a track and I said, ‘Yeah!’ I just happened to have some songs and I played him my songs and he chose one and we did one and it sounded great. So he said, ‘What about doing another?’ It went on like that for about two years.”
Working with Vallance and Lynne remotely, sending demos and pieces of tracks back and forth via the Web thousands of kilometres apart from each other, yielded Adams’ 13th album, a record that took shape in a very random way.
Adams had known Lynne personally since meeting him in 1987 at a show Adams was playing in Birmingham, England.
“He came down with a bunch of his friends to see my show and it was quite casual. Even though we’d met a couple other times over the last umpteen years, it was more in the last couple years that we were able to do some music together. So it’s the right timing for me for sure.
“I remember seeing ELO in 1973,” Adams, 55, adds. “I always liked the songs and the production and what he’s done with other bands and other artists. His reputation is impeccable. I always thought our songs would work really well with his style. I didn’t realize they would work this well, but I was always quietly confident that he’d like it.
“There was never any talk ever of doing an album. We were just making music.”
Despite not coming to life in one specific location (“something I’ve been doing for years now,” Adams says), Get Up! is easily one of Adams’ strongest and most free-flowing and eclectic releases in years. The songs just click instantly, buoyed by the lyrical and musical chemistry that has bound Adams and Vallance since the Vancouver-bred rocker burst onto the scene in the early ’80s.
Featuring 13 songs — nine full band songs and four stripped down acoustic selections from the main album song list — Get Up! is layered with Lynne’s signature production style.
"We Did It All," the first song Vallance and Adams wrote for Lynne, is a victory anthem given a Wings-esque sense of momentum and panache.
“We wanted it to be a song that he could really sink his teeth into,” Adams says.
"That’s Rock And Roll" could easily fit within the Traveling Wilburys song list. (Lynne was a member of the supergroup that also featured Tom Petty, George Harrison and Roy Orbison.)
On a song like "Thunderbolt," Lynne gives Adams’ material a classic ELO sheen, with subtle washes of glitzy synths and phaser effects.
“Thunderbolt" started when I had a guitar made for a photo session with diamante thunderbolts on it and I liked it so much that I thought, ‘This would be a good idea for an album title.’ My working title for the album for a long time was "Thunderbolt." In terms of the production of the track, every time I sent Jeff my demos, within a couple of weeks he’d come back and turn them into records.”
On "You Belong To Me," Adams connects with his rockabilly side, a side he had shown masterfully on his rendition of Eddie Cochran’s "C’mon Everybody," featured as a bonus tune on his last album Tracks Of My Years. That album, released in 2014, was a collection of material that was a tip of the hat to some of the songs and artists (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Chuck Berry, for example) that helped shape his musical vision.
“(The rockabilly side) came out of being asked to do a pilot for a TV series or a film,” Adams says. “A friend of mine’s a director and he wanted songs that were kind of ’60s sounding. Jim and I sat down trying to do a Buddy Holly song and that’s why it sounds like that.”
Although the project never fully materialized Adams says, “It’s OK. It doesn’t matter where the inspiration comes from if you can get songs. There’s another song on the album that came from that request, a song called "Don’t Even Try.”
The key song on the album is "Brand New Day," a tune that contains a core melodic line reminiscent of Adams’ classic "Summer of 69." It also contains the album’s title in its lyrics, and the words “get up” also show up in "That’s Rock And Roll."
“I actually tried to write a song called "Get Up!" and that’s what "Brand New Day" is.”
The videos for "Brand New Day" (featuring actress Helena Bonham Carter) and "You Belong To Me" were both shot and directed by Adams and feature his signature black and white photography style.
Last month Adams — whose portraits have included a number of notable celebrities, artists, musicians and even Queen Elizabeth II — was awarded an honourary fellowship in London’s Royal Photographic Society. Adams has published two books: Exposed, which featured portraits of artists like Sir Ben Kingsley and the late Amy Winehouse, and Wounded — The Legacy of War, which collected intimate photos of wounded British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s nice to get a nod from your peers. What can I say?”
Fresh off a recent tour that saw him celebrate the 30th anniversary of his classic album Reckless, Adams guarantees he will hit the road sooner than later to showcase material from Get Up!
“Well, that’s no question,” he says with an audible grin.