By ALAN SCULLEY

Last Word Features

For nearly three decades, Bryan Adams has been a steady presence on the American concert scene, regularly hitting the road throughout a career that has produced 11 studio CDs and several live releases.

But Adams' next run of U.S. dates will give fans a chance to see him in a setting he has never used on an American tour — as a solo acoustic performer.

The Canadian singer will take the stage at 8 p.m. Friday at the Egg, Empire State Plaza, Albany.

"It just seemed like a good idea," Adams said, explaining his thinking in putting together the solo tour. "The album (his new release, "11") is sort of an acoustic rock record so I thought just try it and seen what happens and have some fun.

"I think for a lot of people that haven't heard me do this before, it will be intriguing, because to play a song like 'Cuts Like a Knife' on acoustic guitar is quite a different thing than hearing it with a full band," he said. "I believe that that will sort of give some insight into perhaps the songwriting, and it shows that some of the new songs, really everything sort of blends in. It's like one solid body of work."

Adams is taking his acoustic show to what for him are decidedly intimate venues — clubs and small theaters — before returning to the big stages in July as the opening act on Rod Stewart's amphitheater tour.

Adams, who was speaking to a small group of writers in a late-April teleconference interview, maintains a heavy enough touring schedule that playing acoustic has to be a refreshing change for his usual full-band shows.

While he no longer cranks out records at the furious pace he maintained early in his career — five albums in the first seven years — Adams said he is as busy as ever.

"I don't think my pace has really changed," he said. "I think what has happened is if anything, I've accelerated the amount of work I've got, because I've ended up playing in so many more places and so many different countries around the world and there's such a bigger, sort of wider breadth of places to go on tour.

"The world has opened up immensely since I started playing 30 years ago," Adams said. "I mean, it was difficult to play places in Europe when I first started and now everywhere is open. We recently played in South America, where I played Ecuador, Columbia, Venezuela, Chili, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. And outside of the one where everywhere one would go to, Brazil, all of the other places in the world are opening and everybody wants music. My album just went platinum in India, for example. I played Pakistan a year and a half ago. I just got offered a show in Dubai. You know, it's endless. That didn't exist when I started."

Adams tours enough these days that both his new CD, "11," and his previous album, "Room Service" (2004) were essentially written and recorded on the road.

"I find it easy to actually record on the road," he said. "And what I do when I write on the road, I actually go on writing tours, where I'll actually go, let's say I'll go to France and work there for a week or I'll go to somewhere in like the Caribbean and I'll work there for two or three weeks and I'll go on excursions, writing excursions.

"And in terms of actually making the record, it's a different process, because what I do is I sort of take the song, and once I've done a bit of a track of it, I'll take it on tour and sort of just start editing it and rewriting and arranging parts for it, until I've got what I think is sort of a good structure," Adams said. "Then I record after shows and things when my voice is ready, when I feel it's good. So whenever I feel inspired, I always have something in front of me so that I can put it down."

The demand for tours, and the continued steady stream of new music from Adams says a lot about the enduring popularity he has managed to achieve since the early 1980s.

It took Adams until his third album, though, to break through in the states. But when he did, it was in a big way. That 1983 album, "Cuts Like A Knife," boasted three hits, the title song, "This Time" and "Straight from the Heart."

This set the stage for Adams' fourth album, the 1984 release "Reckless," which became his biggest hit. It topped the charts on its way to selling 5 million copies, while spawning six hit singles, including the number one hit "Heaven," "Summer of '69" and "Run To You."

He had three more popular albums — "Into The Fire" (1987), "Waking Up the Neighbours" (1991) and "18 'Til I Die" (1996) — before the hits dried up in America for Adams. But he has remained a strong concert draw stateside, while in other countries he has enjoyed continued popularity. ("Room Service" debuted at number one on "Billboard" magazine's European album chart.)

The "11" album (release date May 13) will sound instantly familiar to Adams fans. As usual, the CD is built around hearty and tuneful rock anthems ("Tonight We Have The Stars," and "Flower Grown Wild") and several rough-hewn ballads ("We Found What We Were Looking For" and "Somethin' To Believe In").

But Adams' original plan for the CD would have resulted in a stylistic departure.

"This album started out as an acoustic record, and half way through I sort of switched gears and decided to make sort of an acoustic rock record," Adams said.

As it is, some of the acoustic flavor carries through, although "11" is very much a rock record with full-band arrangements and plenty of electric instrumentation.

The new album also marks a return of a major contributor to Adams' early success — Jim Vallance — who last wrote with Adams for his 1991 CD, "Waking Up The Neighbours." The two co-wrote nearly all of the songs on Adams' first five albums, and Adams said he found that the creative chemistry he always enjoyed with Vallance was still intact.

"When you work with somebody, first of all you know really well, I have a long history with, I have a lot of respect for and musically get along with, something is going to kick off," Adams said. "And Jim and I have always, from the moment we sat down, the day we sat down together in 1978, we wrote a song together. So I know that the chemistry between us is great. And that if we sit down and work together, music happens."

It will be interesting to see if "11" can restore Adams' commercial momentum, especially because the CD is being sold exclusively through Wal-Mart. Of course, that approach worked just fine for the Eagles, moving well over 2 million copies of that group's 2007 CD, "Long Road Out Of Eden," so far.

"It was an absolute no-brainer," Adams said of the Wal-Mart deal. "Wal-Mart came in and said, 'We'd like to order some records,' and we thought great. I know the Eagles have done it and it seemed like a good idea. ... So I thought, good plan, and they seemed enthusiastic and we're all on a page here."