Bryan Adams: Folk Singer for Our Times?

Lake Ontario and the Toronto skyline

The Canadian rocker returns with the bluntly anti-Trump “Lake Ontario.”

“If you want to say something really specific, politically, you get into a territory of language that is very un-musical,” Ani DiFranco said in 2011. “Maybe it’s because we’re not used to hearing this language in song, but ‘patriarchy’ and ‘multinational corporation’—it’s hard to put those across in song and succeed and say something that doesn’t have an expiration date. Or something that does. Folk songs are very often topical, and they’re part newspaper, part song.”

Another unmusical piece of language is “Epstein files,” but Canadian rocker Bryan Adams of “Cuts Like a Knife” fame worked the phrase into his new protest song, “Lake Ontario.”

“Lake Ontario” comes at a time when Adams is feeling his Canadian-ness and about to release a new album focused on his native country, How’s it Goin’, due out November 6. It’s not a folk song in sound or energy level, both of which fans of Adams will recognize as all his. DiFranco’s quote came to mind because of what it does—it speaks to a specific event in a specific moment without concern for its sell-by date. Twenty-five years from now, the Epstein files could be the answer to a trivia question and the controversy over Lake Ontario/Lake America forgotten entirely, but Adams says something that he felt needed to be said right now.

He’s likely also speaking to a specific audience. Critics of the president will be glad to hear things they’ve long believed folded into a song, but in a country feeling an economic downturn brought by a president’s whim and no provocation of their own, the wounds still feel fresh and the casual aggression can’t be shaken off as Trump business as usual.

Canadians will also feel if not recognize the gesture behind the song. One fundamental part of the Canadian identity is the act of defining itself as not like the United States. That definition has meant “different” more than “opposite,” but its early settlers in Ontario didn’t necessarily want independence from England, and its settlement metaphor was the mosaic, not the melting pot.

Part of the beauty of “Lake Ontario” is that it isn’t overworked. Adams didn’t belabor the lyrics—some of which are easy; some of which have bite—and he didn’t fret over it long enough to work out a bridge. The song sounds like he went with it as quickly as he could. He couldn’t beat Lake Ontario T-shirt vendors to market, but for a major act, he got “Lake Ontario” into the world in something like a record industry hurry.

I don’t want to ovesell this song. Bryan Adams is still Bryan Adams, one of the few people about whom I would use the show biz descriptor “rocker.” “Lake Ontario” would sound right at home on a classic rock radio station if such a format exists anymore. His sound isn’t as glossy as it once was—which works to the song’s advantage—but his instincts are not radical ones. I could cynically say that this is the sound of Bryan Adams when the stakes are lowered, but whatever the case, this Adams interests me far more than the hitmaker in the 1980s.