Bryan Adams

Jack S. Broumpton is an assistant professor of music at Huntington
College, Laurentian

University.

This attractive coffee-table book features splendid photographic
highlights of Bryan Adams’s career accompanied by his own words. The
first few photographs are from the early part of his career, when Bryan
shared songwriting duties with partner Jim Valance. The next group are
more recent, from the five-year period culminating with the recording of
his most recent album. The text, which ranges from descriptions of
particular scenes to reflective writing inspired by the photos
themselves, provides the context. Through this album, which chronicles
Bryan’s tours of Europe and Asia and his performances with such
artists as Luciano Pavarotti, Sting, and Tina Turner, one comes to
realize how universal rock music is and how few musical barriers now
exist between genres. This type of book is usually aimed at the devoted
fan, but for the interested follower of Canadian pop music, the visual
representation of this artist’s most successful period documents the
global nature of popular music success today.