Bryan Adams has picked a very public fight with Donald Trump. The Canadian singer behind Summer of ’69 and (Everything I Do) I Do It for You has released a new single, Lake Ontario, that hits back at the US president’s move to rebrand one of the Great Lakes as “Lake America”.
The song appeared midweek as a digital bonus track from Adams’ forthcoming album How’s It Goin’, which is due out on 6 November, according to Consequence and Global News. A lyric video has been released alongside it.
What sparked the song
In August, Trump signed an executive order telling US federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America”, Global News reported. The lake sits on the border between the US state of New York and the Canadian province of Ontario, which is where Adams was born: he is a native of Kingston, a city on its shoreline.
Rather than simply complaining, Adams uses the song as a potted history lesson. According to the reviews and reports published since its release, the lyrics run from the lake’s origins in the Ice Age through its Indigenous names and centuries of use, European exploration and industrial pollution, before landing on the point that a presidential order cannot overwrite all of that.
The track then turns sharper. It casts the renaming as a distraction, linking its timing to the political storm over the Epstein files, and it pokes fun at the president over the conflict with Iran. It also nods to Trump’s repeated “51st state” jibes about Canada and his tariffs on Canadian goods, with a defiant message that the country will not be swallowed up.
Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Jeffrey Epstein. The song is a work of political commentary and makes no new factual claims about him.
Adams: ‘Lake Ontario is forever’
In a statement reported by both outlets, Adams said empires, regimes and rulers come and go, adding: “Lake Ontario is forever.” He described the record as being for “all the sane people on both shores”, a clear signal that he is aiming at politicians rather than ordinary Americans.
It is not the first time the 66-year-old has set his frustrations to music this year. In June he released 51st State, a response to Trump’s talk of absorbing Canada into the United States, timed to arrive before Canada Day. The president has revived that line at recent rallies ahead of the US midterm elections on 3 November.
The reaction online has been predictably split. Global News noted that its own readers were divided, with some praising Adams for speaking up and others accusing him of being out of touch or playing politics.
A whole album about Canada
Adams has said How’s It Goin’ is, simply, a record about his home country. He told Consequence the project grew out of a song he wrote for the nature documentary Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, which led him to write more songs about the place, and that it took his music somewhere a little different from usual.
That makes Lake Ontario a fitting add-on, even if its political edge is far sharper than the stadium-rock love songs that made him one of the best-selling artists of the 1980s and 1990s.
What happens next
The full album lands on 6 November. Adams is in the middle of a five-night residency at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas, which began on 28 October and runs until 1 November, according to Consequence.
He then heads to Europe, with dates running from 6 November to 19 December across Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, France, Denmark and Greece. More Italian shows follow in early 2027, then Australia and New Zealand, a stop in Taiwan on 23 March, Scandinavia and the Baltics in the spring, and a long summer run in Germany, Austria, Belgium and Spain that ends on 22 August 2027. No Irish dates have been listed in the schedule reported so far.
Whether the White House responds is another matter. There had been no official reaction to the song in the reports we reviewed. With the midterms days away, Adams has made sure his voice is in the mix.
Sources
- Global News: Bryan Adams takes aim at Trump, Epstein files in new song ‘Lake Ontario’ (29 October 2026)
- Consequence: Bryan Adams Rails Against Trump’s “Lake America” Order with Single “Lake Ontario” (28 October 2026)
- Global News: New Music Friday, 15 new releases (30 Oct 2026) (30 October 2026)
Featured image: Bryan Adams Hamburg MG 0631 flickr by Marco Maas, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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