TORONTO - Bryan Adams initially planned for his acoustic collection "Bare Bones" to be a modest bit of fan service, something the Canadian rocker could sell on the road after shows.
His record company had other ideas.
"I put (these songs) together not with any intention to put it out as an album," Adams said in a recent telephone interview from Switzerland.
"I made a CD with the intention that I was going to sell it at my shows, and I went on my Twitter page, and asked the fans to recommend: should it be new songs, should it be old songs, what songs should be put on it? And I sort of gathered all their information and then put this album together.
"And then about a month after I put that together, my record company got wind of it, and they were like: 'Hang on a minute. Can we hear this?'
"And the next thing you know, it's being released in 30 countries. And believe me, that was not my intention. The intention was not to try and make this a big global thing."
But Adams -- who has spent most of the year on the road in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Europe, South Africa and even the Middle East -- might have known better.
Clearly, the 51-year-old remains in high demand internationally.
His last album of new material -- 2008's "11" -- charted around the world, in locales as far-flung as India, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, France, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Norway, Austria, Italy, Sweden, the U.K., the U.S., and of course, Canada, where the record hit No. 1.
He had originally planned to record "11" as an acoustic album until he "balled out and decided to bring the band back in."
But he followed his original instinct when it came time to tour, playing the tunes stripped down to their essence.
"Those shows got bigger and bigger and bigger, and next thing you know, I'm on tour doing two and a half hours or two hours of acoustic," Adams recalled. "I thought, you know what, I'm loving this, let's just keep going.
"For the last two years we've been touring like that ... the 'Bare Bones' tour just keeps rolling along."
When he began soliciting suggestions on Twitter for the final tracklist of "Bare Bones," which drops Tuesday, he was surprised at the reaction he received.
"If I showed you the list of stuff that was sent to me from different places all over the world, it would've been a triple album," said Adams, munching on a snack.
"So there were some people that were disappointed because it didn't have this song or that song on it, but you know, maybe we'll make another one -- who knows."
"I'm kind of surprised, and at the same time, really delighted that they like it. And there's no sort of hit single or anything on it, it is what it is."
Well, there are actually plenty of hit singles, but they'll all be familiar to Adams' devotees.
The 20 tracks on "Bare Bones" include some of the Kingston, Ont., songwriter's biggest hits -- "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You," "All for Love," "Summer of 69," "Please Forgive Me," "Cuts Like a Knife" and "Heaven" -- alongside lesser-known cuts including "The Way You Make Me Feel," co-written by Adams for Boyzone frontman Ronan Keating's solo debut, or Bryan White's "You're Still Beautiful to Me," another Adams co-write.
The record also includes snippets of Adams' gravelly banter. After strumming the first few notes of his 1996 hit "Let's Make a Night to Remember," he cracks: "That's all I remember of the song."
And as he wraps his 2002 track "Here I Am," he tells the audience: "OK, well, I don't know if you got the memo about tonight's show or not, but this is the band."
Yet Adams wasn't too worried about the audience's response. He confidently asserts that all of his songs respond well to the acoustic treatment because that's how he wrote them.
"They all work on that level," he said. "The thing is ... people are so used to hearing some of these songs. I mean, SO used to hearing these songs, they can't even imagine what it would be like to hear them stripped down to nothing, you know?
"If I was trying to replicate what I did, there would be no point, you know? The point is to actually present them in a whole new way."
As far as new material from Adams, he says that he and longtime writing partner Jim Vallance -- with whom Adams crafted many of his biggest hits -- have been "working a lot these days."
They communicate remotely, swapping MP3s and chatting on the phone, which suits the globe-trotting Adams.
"You know the way computers are, you can just Skype your best friend and talk to them for an hour, and in that time, we've got a new verse," Adams said.
But does it feel as comfortable as cramming into the same room in Vancouver to hash out new tunes did back in the day?
"It's better," he replies.
Still, he's not sure what shape his new material will take. He has mused on Twitter about releasing a five-song EP, but says nothing is certain at this point.
"I don't even know, do people still make records anymore?" he asks. "I don't know if it makes more sense to just put out songs as you write them as opposed to sort of trying to put together an album and spend a year doing that ... those days just sort of seem to be days gone by.
"It's time to think about new ways of approaching it. ... If you can make songs into events as opposed to making albums into events, I wonder if it's more productive to do that. Unless there's a sort of symmetry with all the songs, or unless you've written so many songs you can't help yourself, you know."
Still, it's a big change from Adams' old go-to methods.
"I used to write 10 songs and then that was the album, and then go on tour for year, and then go back and write 10 more songs, and then put another album out and then go out and tour, and I just kept doing that for a while. But it seems like that's not what people do anymore."
"I think (with) people's attention spans, perhaps giving them one or two songs is really good. They can get into that, and they're into something else."
Is that how Adams now approaches music -- or is he still an album guy?
"I don't know what I am, man," he replied. "Every day's different."
