On a Day Like Today

In retrospect, it's hard not to have seen it coming. When Bryan Adams' eighth regular studio album, On a Day Like Today, was released nine days before his 39th birthday, it spent only two weeks in the charts, becoming his least successful effort since his debut 18 years earlier. The fall seemed sudden, but it had its roots back in 1991, when Adams made a classic Faustian bargain: the massive success of Adams' film-soundtrack ballad "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" set him on a path of more such songs that destroyed his legitimacy as a mainstream rock album artist. The erosion did not become fully apparent until the release of his seventh album, 18 'Til I Die, which stopped at gold but spent nearly a year in the U.S. charts. By the time of On a Day Like Today, however, Adams simply had no contemporary audience left, and this was not the record to rebuild his career. It was defiantly bereft of ballads, nothing to break on the AC chart, and even if his rock audience had been listening, there was nothing here to rank with his earlier signature hits. Adams constructed a series of pleasant, catchy pop/rock songs, their tunes sometimes so derivative that they made you want to play Spot the Riff. The lyrics usually touch on romance, especially romantic triangles, but the words contain so many clichés that they are nearly generic. Some of the commercial failure of On a Day Like Today was due to the Universal-PolyGram merger, which left the album an orphan with no marketing push. But Adams needed to seriously rethink his career, if he expected to have one as a front-line artist past the age of 40.