How Bryan Adams Became Songwriter For KISS

Bryan Adams just released a new double a-side single featuring his renditions the classic KISS songs “War Machine” and “Rock and Roll Hell”, that he co-wrote with Gene Simmons and Jim Vallance, for the masked band’s 1982 album “Creatures Of The Night”.

Adams explained how the collaboration came about during an appearance on Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk of SiriusXM earlier this week. Bryan explained, “I was 21, and I released my album called ‘You Want It, You Got It’. And I got a call from a guy called Michael James Jackson, who was a producer at the time, and he called me to say, ‘Hey, I really like your record. And I’m actually working with this band KISS. Would you like to write a couple of songs with them or for them?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. What? Is this for real?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’

“And so, they flew me to Los Angeles and I met Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and Eric Carr, who was the drummer at the time. I sort of sat down with each one of them individually and wrote songs with each one.

“I wrote a song with Paul and I wrote a song with Eric. And with Gene I didn’t write anything, but Gene had a really good bassline that I sort of recorded on my cassette recorder. And I took it back to Vancouver, and I was telling my usual songwriting collaborator, Jim Vallance, that I’d done this thing, and ‘Check out this bassline of Gene’s.’ And we listened to it, and within an hour or so, we’d written this song called ‘War Machine’ around it.

“So that’s how ‘War Machine’ came about. And then just to drag Jim into it further, he had a song that he wrote by himself called ‘Rock And Roll Hell’. I said, ‘We should retool that song’ – ’cause it didn’t do anything – ‘we should retool it for KISS.’ And he said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a go.’

“So, I came up with a verse idea and then the two of us sort of came up with a lyric idea and we finished the song and sent it down there. And that became the second KISS song. Gene wanted a third verse, so he wrote a third verse for it.”