Bryan Adams turns 65: A picture of a rock star

Everything indicates that Bryan Adams is a completely happy rock star on his 65th birthday today – and, as usual, a particularly hard-working one. Yesterday, November 4th, he performed a concert in Munich’s Olympiahalle as part of his “So Happy It Hurts Tour”. The day after his birthday he will be back on stage in Bolzano, Italy, to receive the “Bambi” in the “Legend” category back in Munich on November 7th. Afterwards, Adams will immediately continue rocking his seemingly endless “So happy it hurts tour”, which has been taking him around the entire globe since 2022 and is not scheduled to end until March 2025.

Why the Canadian rock star can still easily fill the biggest arenas even around 45 years after his career began can be explained primarily by his sellable musical product, which he has always reliably delivered on each of his 15 studio albums to date. His biggest hits include “Summer Of ’69”, “Everything I Do” and “Please Forgive Me”. The words of the “Bambi” jury aptly say: “For more than four decades, his melodic rock has been a constant, with heartfelt songs that speak directly to our feelings. Adams is a master of timeless feel-good rock that provides us with irresistible Catchy tunes that make us sing along, empathize and reminisce into his world.”

In fact, Bryan Adams is a master at creating moods – although he prefers to leave the sadder moods to other colleagues. As the title of his last album “So Happy It Hurts” from 2022 suggests, this one is particularly happy and energetic – and it was produced under dramatically difficult conditions during the peak phase of the corona pandemic.

Since it wasn’t possible to work directly with his band at the time, Adams recorded the entire album alone. As he told Rock Cellar magazine, taking a break was out of the question for him. “I threw myself straight into working on an album,” said the rock star. “I didn’t waste a second, I went straight to work and pulled all the coasters with ideas out of my bags to hang up and then went through one by one until I had about six or seven songs.”

Looking back, the fact that the album ended up being particularly happy may have been due to the fact that he recorded it without a band. “It was really fun,” says Adams, “to make my dream come true and be a drummer myself and then structure each piece of the record individually until it sounded like a song or like an album.”

For over two decades, Bryan Adams has also demonstrated in another creative area that he is a tireless doer who always does his thing with full energy and an amazingly good mood. As a photographer, the all-rounder has created a successful second source of income for himself, which allows him to show completely different sides of himself.

His portraits of other superstars such as Mick Jagger (81), Amy Winehouse (1983-2011), Kate Moss (50) and Sean Penn (64) are now exhibited in well-known galleries, and even the late Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) posed for him in front of the camera. In 2022 he was given the honor of photographing famous colleagues such as Iggy Pop (77), Cher (78) and Rita Ora (33) for the legendary Pirelli calendar.

Adams also achieved great recognition with photographic projects in which he surprisingly addressed the dark side of life. As in his cycle “Wounded – The Legacy of War,” which he created between 2010 and 2013, for which he portrayed young soldiers returning home from Iraq or Afghanistan who were injured in the war. Or his moving portrait series “Homeless”, which he photographed in 2019 for the US homeless magazine “The Big Issue”.

The Canadian himself is obviously a little surprised that he is now enjoying similar success as a photographer as he was as a musician. He told Rolling Stone earlier this year: “It’s strange. I guess I just don’t like doing things by halves. If you asked me to mow your lawn today, I would do it like that afterward would look really great. That’s how I’ve always been, every job has to be done really well.”