Bryan Adams Goes Home: ‘How’s It Goin’’ — His 17th Studio Album Is a Love Letter to Canada, Out This Friday

Bryan Adams has made a record about home. How’s It Goin’ — his 17th studio album, out this Friday, 6 November — is billed as a “deeply personal musical love letter to Canada,” and nearly everything about it points north: its title is the country’s friendliest greeting, its songs are named for Canadian highways, battlefields and heroes, and it arrives via his own BAD Records label, trailing singles that have already turned into talking points on both sides of the border.

The album contains 12 tracks blending country, folk and rock, themed on Canadian people, places and history — a deliberate swerve into storytelling from a singer better known worldwide for stadium-sized love songs. It will be released on CD, as a gatefold LP and digitally, with an A4 hardback book edition for collectors. The digital edition goes one better, adding a 13th, bonus track: “Lake Ontario,” a song that has already done more than its share of the album’s publicity work.

TRACK BY TRACK: SONGS WITH A MAP INSIDE THEM

The track titles read like an itinerary. There is the title track, “How’s It Goin’,” all warmth and greeting. There is “Highway 16,” named for the great northern route across British Columbia and Alberta, and “Diesel & Dirt,” a working song in the country-rock tradition. And there is “The Battle of Lundy’s Lane,” which reaches back to the War of 1812 and one of the fiercest engagements ever fought on Canadian soil — history, set to guitars. Few mainstream rock albums this year will wear their geography so openly, or ask listeners to follow a singer quite so far into the past of his own country.

The emotional centre of the record, by early accounts, is “The Ballad of Terry Fox.” Fox — the young Canadian athlete who, after losing a leg to cancer, set out to run across the country to raise money for cancer research — remains one of the most beloved figures in Canadian life, and Adams’ tribute gives his story the full folk-ballad treatment. The song’s reach will extend beyond the album: it is also set to feature in Run Terry Run, the forthcoming documentary about Fox. For Canadian listeners, a new Bryan Adams song about Terry Fox is close to a national event in itself.

‘51ST STATE’ AND ‘LAKE ONTARIO’: THE SONGS EVERYONE WILL ARGUE ABOUT

Two tracks carry an unmistakably political charge, at least by adjacency. “51st State” takes its title from the annexation rhetoric that has hung over Canada–US relations — the suggestion, floated from Washington, that Canada might one day become part of the United States. Adams has not written a protest pamphlet; by all early descriptions, the album’s patriotism is affectionate rather than angry. But titles are statements, and this one plants a flag. “Lake Ontario” works the same territory from a different angle: Rock Cellar Magazine describes the song as a response to US narratives about renaming the Great Lake — a defence, in melody, of a name on the map. Both songs have already been released as singles, alongside “The Ballad of Terry Fox,” and “Lake Ontario” arrives with a new video that has been gathering attention in the run-up to release.

A BIG WEEK, AT HOME AND ABROAD

The album lands in the middle of a carefully built release week. How’s It Goin’ has been named BBC Radio 2’s Album of the Week, putting Adams in front of one of Britain’s largest music audiences, and a review in Moshville landed on 3 November among the first critical verdicts. The same day, Hello Magazine published a fresh interview with Adams touching on his dream duet, his teenage daughters and his family’s Christmas traditions — the domestic, unguarded side of a singer whose public image was forged in arenas. It is a revealing combination: the album looks outward at a whole country, while the interview looks inward at a household.

SEVENTEEN ALBUMS IN, POINTING HOME

Adams’ place in the story he is singing about is secure. Across more than four decades he has become one of Canada’s defining musical exports — a singer-songwriter whose records sold around the world while his band and his base stayed stubbornly Canadian. A 17th studio album could have been a victory lap. Instead, How’s It Goin’ reads as a roots record in the truest sense: country, folk and rock forms, Canadian stories, released on his own label, on his own terms. Canadian music is having a loud year in general — the race to choose the country’s Eurovision 2027 entry has been running all autumn — but Adams is operating at a different altitude: not competing to represent Canada, simply singing it.

How’s It Goin’ is out on Friday, 6 November, on BAD Records — on CD, gatefold LP and digital, with the A4 hardback book edition for those who want the full keepsake. Seventeen albums into his career, Bryan Adams is not looking for a new direction. He is pointing at the one he came from, and asking, in the friendliest possible way: how’s it goin’?