Bryan Adams

Bryan Adams, born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1959, is the kind of rocker who makes it look easy: a sandpaper voice and a songbook stuffed with choruses built for rolled-down car windows. He put out his first album at 20, and Cuts Like a Knife in 1983 made him a star at home and a contender in the States, with its snarling title track and the ballad "Straight from the Heart".

Reckless, in 1984, is the one that blew the doors off. It topped the charts in Canada and the US, became the first album by a Canadian to go diamond at home, and threw off hit after hit: the moody drive of "Run to You", the heart-on-sleeve power ballad "Heaven", and "Summer of '69", a jangling blast of bravado that has never quite left the radio. The Junos kept handing him Album of the Year and Songwriter of the Year, and he took Entertainer of the Year as well.

The '90s brought "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You", which camped at number one in Britain for 16 straight weeks and turned Waking Up the Neighbours into a worldwide number one, and after that the ballads largely took over. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award honored his lifetime of work in 2010.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.