“Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” by Bryan Adams (1995)

One critic’s view:  “Listening to it, I mostly just feel great embarrassment for everyone involved.” – Tom Breihan @ Stereogum

The public’s view:  2.08 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1995 through 1997

In my previous post, I described the doldrums that nearly destroyed pop music radio in the early 1990s.  Some broadcasters dug a hole so deep for themselves that it was almost impossible to climb out, even when the rest of the industry began to recover.  The most myopic stations had adopted a racially tinged anti-hip-hop posture with slogans like “Today’s best music, without the rap.”  Those FM outlets were forced to clumsily excise the increasingly popular rap interludes from hit songs such as TLC’s “Waterfalls”.  When Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” became the best-selling single of 1995, these “no-rap” stations were left out of the party altogether.  It was hard to find eggs in the supermarket for a while, because all of them were on the faces of radio programmers.

So what do you do when you’ve stupidly blocked your station from playing the year’s hottest record?  You go back to your mellowed ex-rocker friend Bryan Adams to see what he’s cooked up lately.  His newest adult contemporary release, “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?”, featured a sweet melody and a pleasant Spanish guitar part played by celebrated flamenco musician Paco de Lucía.  Best of all, Rod Stewart and Sting were nowhere to be found.  It was time for yet another Bryan Adams soundtrack single to get some major airtime.

There are many reasons why “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” is not as fondly remembered as Adams’s 1980s songs.  The cringeworthy lyrics are most of those reasons.  While the entire first and second verses are pretty bad, the reference to seeing “your unborn children in her eyes” is perhaps the most widely ridiculed line of any 1990s #1 hit.  There’s also a grating dissonance between Adams and the Spanish guitar.  Husky-voiced white guys from Vancouver don’t typically try to sound like they’re part of the mariachi ensemble at El Burrito Sucio Restaurante.  It’s like if Justin Bieber decided he wanted to front a traditional Mississippi blues band.  Even without all the hand-wringing about cultural appropriation, it just isn’t a musical combination that most people want to hear.

Maybe that’s why five weeks at #1 weren’t enough to secure a permanent spot in our communal heritage for “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?”.  The song is being swallowed by the sands of time, and those sands are going to need an antacid afterwards because they are chewing way too fast.  Your last remaining option for hearing the original hit version on YouTube is on a fan-made slideshow with just a few thousand views.  (The performance clip above uses audio from a sound-alike recording that Adams put together with a different guitarist in 2022, long after Paco de Lucía’s death.  It is misleadingly labeled as the “classic” version.  I don’t know why Adams chose to redo the song note-for-note like Taylor Swift did with her older albums.  We can blame Scooter Braun for a lot of things, but not this.)  The song’s official video from 1995 has vanished from YouTube altogether; only a lo-res copy survives on Facebook.  There aren’t any unborn children in anyone’s eyes in that clip.  Mostly, there are a bunch of people who are wearing Zorro masks for no reason.

When we consider the legacy of Bryan Adams, there is much to admire.  “Summer of ‘69”, “Cuts Like a Knife”, and “Run to You” are all classic songs, or at least near classic.  Adams has published acclaimed photography books of homeless people and wounded veterans, and has donated the proceeds to charity.  Most impressively, he’s turned back to his rock ‘n’ roll roots and is cranking out some respectable guitar anthems in his sixties.  It’s a shame that all four of his #1s were movie ballads that don’t reflect his best work.  It says more about us than it does about him.