Robert John “Mutt” Lange is among the most iconic record producers of all-time.
AC/DC‘s Highway to Hell and Back In Black, Foreigner 4, Def Leppard‘s Pyromania and Hysteria and ex-wife Shania Twain’s early catalog are just a random sampling of his multi-platinum golden touch.
But for the past 10 years the South African-born Lange has been more than merely scarce — unless you’re Bryan Adams.
The two have a long history; Lange was behind the board for Adams’ 1991 album Waking Up the Neighbors and 1996’s 18 til I Die, and they won a Grammy Award in 1991 for “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” from the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which Lange co-wrote with Adams and Michael Kamen, and produced.
He also handled some tracks for Adams’ So Far So Good in 1993, The Best of Me in 1999, Room Service in 2004, 11 in 2008 and So Happy It Hurts just three years ago.
Lange’s back again for Adams’ latest, Roll With the Punches, not producing but contributing keyboards on five of the 10 tracks and backing vocals on nine. So does the Canadian rockers have compromising photos or what?
Read More: 51 Songs Bryan Adams Wrote For Other Artists
“I love working with him,” Adams tells UCR. “I kept sending him ideas; every time I come up with a chorus or a verse or something, or if I have a (basic) track, I’d send it to him and say, ‘What do you think of this? Could you sing background vocals on this for me?’ It’s not tough to get him inspired; he loves music so much. It just ended up being a really cool collaboration.”
Adams says a couple of the songs on Roll With the Punches came from ideas Lange was working on with a Swedish singer. “They hadn’t really completed anything,” he notes. “They just had a bunch of tracks. That’s how songs like ‘Will We Ever Be Friends Again’ came together, (and) ‘Life is Beautiful. ..They sort of started something, then didn’t finish it or it needed to be finished. So along comes the fixer…I wouldn’t actually call myself that, ’cause Mutt’s the fixer. He’s amazing putting things together. But we would go back and forth on the Internet. We never actually met, but it worked great.”
Lange isn’t the only longtime Adams collaborator involved on Roll With the Punches. Longtime co-writer Jim Vallance, shows up doing backing vocals for “A Little More Understanding,” a song Adams says they’d started together and he found “in digging through my computer archives and finished.” “I want to try to inspired Jim to get back into it again,” Adams explains. “I think after (the Broadway musical) Pretty Woman Jim was like, ‘Yeah, I ain’t doing this anymore. I’m done with this. That’s enough.'(laughs) He doesn’t want to do anything after that. So slowly but surely I’m trying to inspire him to get back into the fold, ’cause he’s one of the best, man.”
Roll With the Punches is Adams’ first set of all-new material for his own BAD Records label; the first was 2022’s Classic and Classic Pt. II, a two-volume set of re-recordings of his hits. It comes alongside him taking over management of his career as well, though Adams maintains that “honestly, it doesn’t feel that much different.”
“I’m doing everything like I used to, and having more fun with it,” explains Dams who’s planning to create vinyl editions of his albums that were never released in that format and is plotting another set called Tough Town, which will compile some of his non-album tracks from movie soundtracks and other endeavors.
“I’m having more fun in sort of the creative side…things which I supposed could have been done if I’d had somebody at the label that was interested in doing these things, but they weren’t. Once an album came out, it would just do what it was gonna do…and then they disappear, and unless you`re a touring artist you have no way of furthering that. I feel grateful that I AM a touring artist, so I can keep talking about the music and putting things out.
“I felt like I was managing myself for quite awhile. Let’s just put it this way; an artist doesn’t leave a manager for no reason. But then let’s just put it this way; everything’s going great, and we’re rolling with the punches.”
Adams is in the midst of a U.S. tour that runs through Nov. 26, followed by a run of U.K and European dates in December and Asia in the new year.
Bryan Adams Albums Ranked
Hitmaking Canadian heartland rocker was the king of arena-sized hooks in the mid-’80s through mid-’90s.
Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
