I remember thinking that Cuts Like a Knife, Adams' first real attention-getting hit, was decidedly fine but it wasn't exactly my thing. Each hit that came off of his following record, the eventual Juno Album of the Year Reckless, had a very different feel to them. In short: they all felt like big, important hit songs.
I just read now that It's Only Love, my personal favourite, was the last track released as a single, so I wonder if I was a little late to the party and backtracked my way through appreciating the rest. Actually, I do also remember still being somewhat indifferent to the first single Run to You, so I definitely was slow to totally buy in.
I would have felt bad saying back in 1984 that Adams had reached his peak with this album but, with the gift of many extra years' worth of perspective (and still some more really good songs to come), yeah, this was the top of the mountain for him.
Now, what to say about Thriller?
Well, it seems that the impetus for releasing the title track as a single and accompanying it with its legendary video was that the album's sales had finally started slowing down. It's a little cosmically crazy so think that, arguably, the album's most famous feature was not part of the plan the whole time.
We're actually talking about November of 1983 right now, but the massive spike in popularity led to the album taking one more victory lap as the top-seller of 1984.
It looks like the video's Canadian premiere date was a little behind the U.S., but I do remember staying up to watch it on The New Music on Citytv. In my mind it was a midnight premiere, but surely I can't have stayed up until midnight and toddled off to class in Grade 4 the next morning? Maybe it was at 9:00 pm and that felt like midnight.
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