Not many veteran pop stars of the last three decades would attempt a solo acoustic tour.

Stripping songs of their production values can expose weaknesses that some hitmakers would rather stay hidden.

But Canadian rocker Bryan Adams is made of sterner stuff.

Adams has been going it alone for more than a year now as part of a tour or two inspired by his album of stripped down hits called “Bare Bones.”

He performs Wednesday at the Embassy Theatre.

“Fear of the unknown” is what drew Adams to the concept, precisely the sort of emotion that would drive most people away.

“It’s just really something that had been bubbling up inside me for some time,” he says. “At the very beginning of my career, it was just me and a guitar and a goal of going in the route of my dreams, which involved being in a band and rocking out. Now that I’ve done the band thing on every level, there’s something to be said for going back-assward.”

Adams says some of his songs were harder than others to rework as solo pieces but “all of them are quite playable,” he says.

“Some of the songs that had instrumentals. … You know, I shouldn’t even say that,” he says. “ ‘It’s Only Love’ played acoustically is really good.”

Bryan Guy Adams was born on Nov. 5, 1959, in Kingston, Ontario.

The son of a British-born Canadian diplomat, Adams moved around quite a lot with his family until his parents separated and he and his mother ended up in Vancouver.

One of his earliest musical memories is of walking home from school “singing a Stevie Wonder song in (his) head.”

“No one was around, so I started singing it out loud,” he says. “It sounded OK. Please insert inverted commas there: I was ‘just OK.’ But I wouldn’t have been embarrassed if anyone had overheard me.”

At 15, Adams quit school and used the money his parents had set aside for his college education to buy a grand piano.

Asked whether his parents objected to this repurposing of his inheritance, Adams says, “They didn’t really have much choice.”

“That was what was going to happen,” he says.

While Adams admits he never became a virtuoso on the instrument, he says that the songs he was able to write on the keyboard have repaid the cost of that piano “many times over.”

Adams says his parents would have preferred that he had gone to a university and he understands and sympathizes with that now, even if he chafed at it then.

The teenaged Adams became lead singer of a glam rock band, Sweeney Todd, for a year (Nick Gilder of “Hot Child in the City” fame was a previous frontman).

He says his memories of those early bands are fuzzy at best.

But eventually he met up with the guy who would become his songwriting partner for life, Jim Vallance.

“It was the late ’70s in a music store,” he says of their first meeting. “I’d been paying my rent working in the studios. He was on the scene as well.

“I had sort of heard of him,” Adams says. “I was familiar with his work as a songwriter. I was really young and hadn’t yet worked out my ideas. None of them were really formed into songs. He became not only my songwriting partner but my tutor. He went about finding a way of making some of my ideas work.

“I think I still owe him some bus fare,” he says, laughing.

That fortuitous union produced innumerable hits and high points for Adams, including nominations for, and bestowals of, every entertainment award imaginable.

But he says the night that looms largest in his memory is one from 1981, when he was not yet famous.

Not surprisingly, it was a night that tapped into some of that aforementioned “fear of the unknown.”

“I was 21 years old,” he says. “We had an opening slot playing in front of the Kinks. I didn’t have any hit records. I only had one or two albums out at the time. I was just starting out.”

“I got on stage and I could tell this was going to be really hard,” Adams says. “Harder than any audition I’d ever had. I knew that nothing had prepared me for playing in front of the Kinks’ audience. When I got on stage, I realized what a huge pill I was going to swallow.

When he finished his set, Adams says he hugged his guitar player.

“I was so happy we had gotten through that alive,” he says. “Alive and smiling.”

spen@jg.net