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Release Date: October 18, 2005 Label: A&M Related Sites: · Official Site Grade: A

Canadian-born Bryan Adams has parlayed his raspy vocals and no-frills rock 'n' roll into a successful career of impressive longevity. Universal has collected the vast majority of his hits into a magnificent package that effectively chronicles twenty-five years of chart success. The 2-CD set is bundled with a DVD concert filmed in Lisboa, Portugal in 2005. The running order is roughly in chronological order.

It opens with "Remember" from his self-titled LP launched in 1980. While I would have preferred the more familiar "Hidin' From Love," it does sound more dated and I can see why they picked the song they did to represent his first album. This set had such an inauspicious beginning that Adams wanted to title his follow-up "Bryan Adams Hasn’t Heard Of You Either." Instead, his assembled tunes became You Want It, You Got It which produced the first song of his career to break into the American charts, "Lonely Nights."

It wasn't until 1983, with Cuts Like a Knife, that Adams' career really began to take off. He scored his first top ten hit, "Straight from the Heart," a ballad that Bonnie Tyler had earlier recorded for her album that featured the monster hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart." His third album generated two other hits in "This Time" and the title track. Arguably his most successful album followed with Reckless, storming the charts with two top ten hits ("Run to You" and the rocking "Summer of '69"), three that landed in the top twenty ("Somebody", "One Night Love Affair" and "It's Only Love, a blistering duet with Tina Turner) and the #1 smash "Heaven." The latter was originally written for the forgettable film A Night in Heaven (it's so forgettable, in fact, that I won't even subject you with the plot or who starred in it) and has proved so enduring that a dance version by DJ Sammy & Yanou Featuring Do hit the top ten in 2002 and spent nine weeks at the top of Billboard's maxi-singles sales chart.

Adams found success for a time with songs written specifically for motion pictures. The piano ballad "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" ruled the music world in 1991 from the Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, sitting atop the Billboard charts in America for seven weeks, and spending a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one on the charts in the United Kingdom. Also hitting #1 were the Spanish guitar inflected "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" (from Don Juan DeMarco) and all-star collaboration with Rod Stewart and Sting on "All For Love" (from The Three Muskateers). In 2002, he wrote songs to fill an entire soundtrack for the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron which produced the hit "Here I Am." There are a few movie songs that don't make it onto this collection, like the beautiful "When You Love Someone" (from Hope Floats) and the unlikely duet with Barbra Streisand "I Finally Found Someone" (from The Mirror Has Two Faces).

Adams has always been a terrific and energetic live performer, and the included DVD shows that he has not lost a step. His older hits show up in new renditions, like a refashioned "Heaven" that picks up the pace while staying true musically to the original. The second CD features several live tracks, included a rollicking duet with Bonnie Raitt on "Rock Steady." The excellent pairing with Anne Murray on his composition "What Would It Take" doesn't appear on this collection, though its inclusion could in itself have launched a game similar to "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (in which, astonishingly, Adams has a Bacon number of 2). "18 Til I Die" is the same performance found on the DVD, and "Back to You" and "I'm Ready" are "live" in the sense that they were played before an audience on MTV Unplugged.

Waking up the Neighbours continued Adams' chart dominance in late-1991 and 1992 with the #2 smash "Can't Stop This Thing We Started" and hits "There Will Never Be Another Tonight" and "Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven" (though "Do I Have To Say The Words?", which peaked at #11, is missing here). Written and produced with "Mutt" Lange, these tunes sounded like, you guessed it, Def Leppard. Though his chart success in America began to wane in the mid-1990s, Adams continued to be popular abroad. Virtually ignored in the United States, 1998's On a Day Like Today produced the Beatle-esque title-track as well as the highly-danceable mix of "Cloud Number Nine."

Adams' prolific pen proceeded to churn out one good straight-on rock song after the other, though signs that he might be "jumping the shark" appeared on his latest offering, Room Service. "This Side of Paradise," the first single, lifted an entire line word-for-word ("we wander 'round in the darkness but every now and then a little light shines through") from his song "A Little Love" which appeared on his unplugged album. While this was somewhat off-putting, it was nothing compared to Pamela Anderson's singing debut on "When You're Gone." Originally a duet with Mel C. (of Spice Girls fame), this is the same song from On a Day Like Today, with the female vocals replaced. It is a testament to how great this song is that you can plug virtually anybody into the harmony part. However, Anderson totally sounds like she's singing karaoke. That is, until she attempts to actually emote, and then it gets painfully bad. Unfortunately, this song has been selected to be released as a single. After hurtling over the shark, the collection closes out with the previously unreleased "So Far So Good," a song originally meant for inclusion in his greatest-hits package of the same name. It's obvious why it hasn't seen the light of day because it is nothing special.

The 24-page booklet features several vintage pictures as well as notes on each of the songs. Most of the comments are interesting. For example, my impression of three guys (Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting) hanging out and belting out "All For Love" was dashed when I learned that each vocal was recorded on a different continent. An essay by Dave Marsh was kind of lame, and didn't seem to adequately capture a snapshot of Adams' career. I could have done with a few less songs from Room Service in favor of those few remaining hits that were excluded. Though I must say I enjoyed the new musical territory explored with the country flavored "Why Do You Have to Be So Hard to Love" and harmonica on "Open Road." In the end, this is just nitpicking over what is an outstanding anthology of this prolific songwriter that captures his stylistic endeavors from ballad to rock 'n' roll with equal aplomb.