I haven't listened to Bryan Adams Self-Titled debut in years. The album as a whole is serviceable. The songs are okay, not great. Other than the lead track Hidin' From Love, the rest of the album, although good, it's not something I would be clamoring to listen to again anytime soon. Had I picked up this album back when it came out, just listening to it, I would never have guessed that he would turn out to be a huge star a few short years later. I didn't get into Bryan until Cuts Like A Knife came out. It was only years later did I myself decide to go back and pick up his earlier stuff on CD. For the longest time I thought that Knife was his debut. What did I know? I was just a kid then. The monster hits were still a few years away.

Fave Songs: Hidin' From Love, Win Some, Lose Some and Remember

Cuts Like A Knife is the album that I discovered Bryan Adams for the first time, more specifically, the Title Track by way of the video that was in heavy rotation on MTV. That voice, that guitar solo, that.....Hot Babe in a bikini!! Yes, the video was pretty damn cool, but the song is what hooked me and still does to this day. The album as a whole is pretty good, but not perfect. Bryan's definitive trademark sound is all over the album, but there's really only a few songs that just nailed it for me and are true hits. Knife, This Time and What's It Gonna Be still deliver in a big way for me.

As for the rest of the album, the songs tend to fall into radio-friendly "ballads" that were clearly aimed at reaching a specific demographic. I think a long the lines of how Michael Bolton crafted some of his albums of trying to lock down two types of fans, but hoping that the ballads would get him over into a larger fan base. When done right, the songs can be very distinct sounding, when done wrong, they just blend one into the other. Overall, Knife is a solid album, even if I don't listen to it all that much anymore. Of all the ballads on this one, Straight From The Heart is still pretty damn good.