Taking a portable studio packed into two suitcases on the road, Bryan Adams recorded these 11 songs in different hotel rooms around Europe. Unsurprisingly, there’s a restless theme to many of them, such as “Open Road” and the title track (“You could be in Philadelphia, you could even be in Rome”), Adams’ instinctive grasp of classic rock idioms can sound as if he’s doing it by numbers, while his ballads sometimes sound like a poor man’s Rod Stewart. But despite its inherently conservative nature, Room Service is still a better record than you might imagine.
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