My relationship with Bryan ended during the Neighbours album (to be revived a decade later). We'd been writing songs almost every day for a year and we were starting to burn out, personally and creatively. I suggested we take a break, but Bryan refused. His previous album, Into The Fire, had fallen short of sales expectations and Bryan was obsessed with completing the Neighbours album as soon as possible in hopes of reestablishing his music industry foothold.

So we kept writing ... eight, ten, twelve hours a day ... seven days a week. We were frustrated and exhausted. The quality of our songwriting was deteriorating. What's worse, the "vibes" in the room were becoming increasingly frayed and intense.

A few years later, in a candid interview with Toronto's Globe & Mail newspaper, Bryan confessed: "I think if we could have taken a break and worked on it on a more casual basis, we'd still be together". 

Around the same time he told a Vancouver Sun interviewer, "Jim knew when it was time to stop -- I didn't."

By the summer of 1988 we'd completed a dozen songs.  Bryan decided eight of them were ready for recording.

In July Bryan flew to England and cut the tracks at Olympic Studios with U2 producer Steve Lillywhite.  But he wasn't happy with the results, so he fired Lillywhite and re-hired his previous producer, Bob Clearmountain.

In May 1989 Adams and Clearmountian recorded the songs again, this time at A&M Studios in Los Angeles.  But that didn't work either. So Bryan recorded some of the tracks a third time, this time producing the sessions himself. Buut he still wasn't satisfied (see "The Lost Album").

By now Bryan was beginning to realize that all those songs, written under duress, were simply not good enough.  He'd have to go back to the drawing board.

In the summer of 1989 Mutt Lange came "on board" and helped us write some new songs, and re-write some of the old ones.  Mutt was a huge inspiration.  It seemed like we were finally getting back on track musically ... but it was too late for me and Bryan on a personal level. It had been an intense and unpleasant twelve months and our relationship had been damaged beyond repair.

Bryan moved to England, while I remained in Canada, and for most of the next decade we hardly spoke.

Beginning in 2001 Bryan and I started spending time together again. In the 20-plus years since then we've collaborated on numerous songs, plus I occasionally perform with him in concert, joining him for a few songs on piano.

Two phrases come to mind: "never say never" and "time heals everything".

James Hunter, Rolling Stone Magazine (4 stars): Waking up the Neighbours' will, with no sweat, reestablish Bryan Adams as the radio's hoarse purveyor of energy and fun. A scrupulously careful yet adamantly alive piece of work, this collaboration between the Canadian singer-guitarist and the Midas-touch songwriter-producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange alternates half-tamed sonic raunch like "Is Your Mama Gonna Miss Ya?" and "Hey Honey – I'm Packin' You In!" with eloquent mall ballads such as "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You," Adams's current planet-wide phenomenon, and the even moodier "Do I Have to Say the Words?" For further balance there is fairly soulful midtempo rock ("Depend on Me") and an oddly toned state-of-the-world finale called "Don't Drop That Bomb on Me."

Like most capable pop craftsmen hellbent on seizing the airwaves, Adams and Lange walk a fine line between familiarity and derivativeness, between the blazingly immediate and the outright stale. So some tunes on Waking Up the Neighbours have turned out too broad for anyone's taste. "House Arrest" doesn't convey much of the atmosphere of "justa havin' a ball," and the hectoring sing-along "There Will Never Be Another Tonight" collapses into silliness in no time flat. More often, however, all Adams and Lange's high-impact verses and choruses and bridges and subbridges work like charms. The arrangements are only faintly dressed up with well-chosen bits of keyboard and percussion, and Bob Clearmountain's mix emphasizes Adams's vocals and Keith Scott's memorable guitar hooks – not, as per current market fashion, the rhythm section.

Bryan Adams became a superstar on the basis of Reckless, from 1984, an album released just as Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. was beginning to exert its enormous influence over how guitar-defined popsters should think, sound and wear their denim. Three years later, with his dull Into the Fire, Adams let his always believable passion for melody and crunch lead him into attempts at the sort of topical, introspective songwriting that Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp sometimes can pull off. But between 1987 and right now, the Traveling Wilburys restored humor and the Black Crowes embraced vulgarity. However you may feel about this turn of events in the evolution of nonmetal, bestselling guitar pop, one thing seems certain: It's coaxed Bryan Adams back toward his natural calling.