As I have noted previously, one of the handful of albums I owned as a child was Bryan Adams’ Reckless. And I owned it because friends of mine — the previously mentioned Becca, her older sister, and her best friend — were rabid Bryan Adams fans. I distinctly remember standing in the parking lot at the school near all our houses while those three jumped up and down over some manner of B. Adams news — potentially that he was coming to town, though also potentially just a morsel of swoon-inducing gossip one of them had heard about him.

Twenty years and several cities later, another friend would introduce me to Ryan Adams, an altogether different singer-songwriter type. I LOVED the Ryan Adams, particularly the Heartbreaker record. “To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)” is, to my mind, pretty much a perfect song. But then boyfriend started putting out an album every other day, of rather diminished quality, and I kind of lost interest. Not before I’d dragged my friend Amy to see him in concert, though — at a venue where we felt like we raised the median age by a good ten years. Sigh.

During the three or four years when I was all about the Ryan Adams, I frequently found myself, while raving about him to others, defensively and/or pre-emptively saying something along the lines of “No no no, not BRYAN Adams, RYAN Adams. They are TOTALLY different.” Because, what, I couldn’t let people think I liked the Bryan Adams? That would be fatally uncool? Come on. Just another instance of me needing to get over myself.

It’s also totally false, because I loooooved me that Reckless album, and pretty much listened to no other song in the summer of 1991 than “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.” I spent that summer on the coast, cleaning houses, and careening around narrow coastal roads in my grandfather’s big old Lincoln/Cadillac/some other make of gigantic car, singing at the top of my lungs.

And even though R.A. insists he has gotten over it, I can’t quite forgive him for being so humorless about the B.A. connection. I mean, lighten up, dude. (Except when you are writing songs: I like you best when you are tearing your own heart out.)