“Please Don’t Give It Away!”: Bryan Adams Came Within Inches of Losing One of His Biggest Classics

2025 marked a major milestone for Bryan Adams. Besides the voice behind songs like “Summer of ‘69”, he spent five decades leaving his mark on the music industry. And he did it on and off the stage. Besides selling over 100 million albums, he was an accomplished music producer and songwriter. Having worked with iconic bands like KISS, Adams had more than a few memories. Recently, he took a trip down memory lane, remembering how he nearly gave away the hit song “Run to You.” 

Videos by American Songwriter

Released in 1984 on the album Reckless, the track, which surrounds the narrator struggling with infidelity, “Run to You” climbed the US Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart and even landed on the Billboard Hot 100. Looking at the numbers, the song received over 308 million streams on Spotify. His other song, “Summer of ‘69”, crossed the one billion streams mark. 

But again, when first writing “Run to You”, Adams almost gave it away, as he explained in. arecent interview with 97.1 Rock. “Way back when I was working with Jim Vallance and we were just trying to carve it out as songwriters. Sometimes we put ourselves in a position of, ‘Okay, today we’re going to write a song for such and such, even if we didn’t know how to get that song to them or not.”

[RELATED: Bryan Adams Says This Artist Is the Only One to Ever Do “Summer of 69” Justice]

Bryan Adams Was Urged Not To “Give It Away”

Using the song as an example, Adams continued, “Sometimes that would inspire something [really good]. For example, the song ‘Run to You’ was written for a band called Blue Oyster Cult. They never got it or if they did, the producer, Bruce Fairbairn, who we gave it to, he never played it for them.”

It wasn’t just Blue Oyster Cult, .38 Special also received a chance to cover the song but decided to pass. 

With Adams shopping the song around, his guitarist, Keith Scott, urged him to keep it. “I remember the phone call. [Bryan] said, ‘I just wrote this thing. It was for Blue Oyster Cult. But I don’t think they’re going to keep it.’ I said, ‘Please don’t give it away!’”

Knowing he was sitting on a hit, Scott’s instincts proved right as “Run to You” became one of Adams’ defining songs, launching him further into rock history and reminding the world that sometimes the best songs are the ones you keep for yourself.

(Photo by Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)