Please Forgive Me: The Anthology Reviews #6: "Run To You"

Please Forgive Me: The Anthology Reviews is a track-by-track in-depth analysis of Bryan Adams's legacy in 36 installments.

Disc 1 Track #6: "Run To You" (Oct. '84)

After striking a deep rich vein of coming right straight at you with hard-hitting rockingness, tempered by softer verse-y parts and bounding into a pounding chorus with "This Time", a switch of gears was in order. "Run To You" comes right straight at you with its softer verse-y parts, then cranks up the harder-hitting rockingness and bounds into a pounding chorus.

You know, it's funny. Before I started trying to describe them, the two songs seemed totally dissimilar in my mind! It's a tribute to Adams and his band that they don't bear much if any resemblance, despite the structural similarities. The tone struck by each song is markedly different.

At the time of its release, "Run To You" seemed like more than just a change of pace. It was a big step up, a revelation, a maturation. The darker lyrical mood, conflicted passion, hints of infidelity - angsty business indeed!

Another big point in its favor at the time was the video. The "Run To You" video was deemed to be pretty deep. At its time. To my recollection, this was the first of Adam's videos to really draw notice on its own merit, rather than just the song's (okay, "Heaven", with its concert hall with all the seats filled by tv sets, was impressive as well. People were like, "holy cow, that must have taken them all day. Dragging in all those tvs. Hooking them up!" Videos were so much less contrived then). While the focus of this series is foursquare on the songs themselves and not their videos, I will note in passing that clip for this one was most definitely a groundbreaker. Because, in the video, he's standing there singing the song, and then running through studio sets dressed to represent Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter - fake leaves, fake snow - the four seasons, all right there in one clip! It was all considered quite ballsy, quite symbolic, by the viewers of the day. A mark of maturity, at a time when many of the clips on MTV had next-to-zero concept, and were pretty amateurish in the execution.

The production values on this video were quite high. These days, all the fake leaves and fake snow would have been done with CGI, and it would have just ended up looking fake! But you watch this video even to this day, and it can't help but impress you. You'll be like, "Whoa. Those are real fake leaves!"