This Time

Bryan Adams' "This Time": An Early Hot 100 Entry From a Career on the Cusp of International Stardom

Bryan Adams was a Vancouver-born singer-songwriter who had been recording and releasing material on A&M Records since 1980, beginning with a self-titled debut album that generated modest commercial interest without producing a significant mainstream breakthrough. His second album, You Want It You Got It (1981), similarly failed to crack the upper tiers of the American market despite demonstrating clear creative development. By 1983, however, Adams and his primary songwriting collaborator Jim Vallance had refined their approach to melodic rock and pop with sufficient precision to produce material that resonated simultaneously with radio programmers, album buyers, and concert audiences. The album Cuts Like a Knife, released in January 1983 on A&M Records, represented a qualitative and commercial leap that positioned Adams for the sustained international success he would achieve across the remainder of the decade and well into the 1990s.

Vallance was a former member of the Vancouver-based rock band Prism who had developed with Adams a collaborative songwriting chemistry that proved remarkably productive throughout the early 1980s and beyond. Their working method typically involved Vallance constructing musical frameworks and Adams contributing lyrical and melodic ideas in a back-and-forth process that generated songs with strong hooks, clear emotional narratives, and a melodic directness suited to mainstream rock radio. This systematic and disciplined approach to the craft of songwriting, in which iteration and refinement were valued as much as initial inspiration, produced a catalog of well-constructed and commercially durable songs that wore their influences lightly.

"This Time" was written by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance and appeared on Cuts Like a Knife, which was produced by Bob Clearmountain, one of the most sought-after and commercially successful production figures of the era. Clearmountain's credits during this period included work with the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Roxy Music, among many others, and his particular skill was bringing clarity, presence, and emotional directness to rock recordings that made them translate powerfully across both album-oriented rock radio and more mainstream pop formats. Clearmountain's production of Cuts Like a Knife gave the recordings a sonic quality that made them competitive across a broader range of radio programming contexts than Adams's earlier work had achieved.

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 3, 1983, at number 83. It climbed methodically through the autumn, moving to 59, then 46, then 42, then 37, before eventually peaking at number 24 on October 29, 1983, after 12 weeks on the chart. This performance placed it as a solid mid-tier commercial success within the album's overall singles campaign, which also included the higher-charting "Straight from the Heart" and the title track, demonstrating Adams's ability to sustain multiple consecutive chart entries within a single promotional cycle.

Cuts Like a Knife was certified platinum in the United States and performed strongly in Canada, where Adams had an even more established audience base. The album's commercial success represented a genuine turning point in Adams's American career, establishing both his artistic identity and his commercial viability with a clarity that his earlier work had not achieved. The success also validated the A&M Records commitment to his development across multiple album cycles rather than abandoning him after the more modest returns of his first two releases.

The follow-up album, Reckless (1985), elevated Adams to a genuinely global commercial tier, producing six charting singles including "Summer of '69" and "Run to You" and becoming one of the best-selling albums of that year. But the groundwork was unmistakably laid by Cuts Like a Knife and tracks including "This Time," which established the stylistic consistency, the radio credibility, and the audience relationship that made the subsequent acceleration possible. Adams went on to become one of the most commercially successful Canadian recording artists in history, with his 1991 single "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" from the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves reaching number one in sixteen countries simultaneously, a commercial landmark that reflected a career built on the patient craft development evident in the earlier work.