Are we in Heaven, or Hell?
His new single “Lake Ontario” — which will also be featured as a bonus track on his upcoming album, How’s It Goin’, scheduled for release next week — comes after Adams released the self-explanatory song “51st State” on Canada Day.
Bryan Adams is out here cosplaying as the conscience of the Great Lakes like he just discovered Canada on a layover. The guy who spent decades photographing stills of Kate Moss and the Queen for London galleries, living the soft expat life, suddenly remembers he’s from Kingston the minute Trump renames a lake. Now it’s all “first nations name – not an executive order” and “we’ll never be the 51st state,” delivered in the voice of a man who once wrote the soundtrack for a Robin Hood movie
He’s the musical equivalent of Mike Myers showing up in a Team Canada jersey after twenty years of Austin Powers and Shrek money: the Come From Away energy of someone who mostly came from away, stayed away, and only elbows up when the algorithm needs a Canadian content quota. The photography was the classy side hustle. The new album is the “how’s it goin’, eh?” plastic patriotism
His commercial success was built overwhelmingly on the US market—roughly 17.5 million albums sold there versus about 5.3 million in Canada—so the American audience that made him rich is the same one he’s now casually dunking on for domestic political points
@bryanadams— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) October 29, 2026
