Third in a series of five Music Life Magazine interviews with 2025 Inductees into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Legends Induction Ceremony takes place Friday, Oct. 17, at the Lyric Theatre in the Meridian Arts Centre in downtown Toronto.
By Jim Barber
When the subject of an interview is the son of a philosophy professor and a church organist, whose brother is considered to be amongst the pantheon of Canadian comedic talent, you know a thoughtful, witty and erudite experience is in the offing.
And Ian Thomas did not disappoint. One of five new inductees into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, the brother of SCTV alum Dave Thomas, whose Wales-born father John was head of the Philosophy Department at Hamilton’s McMaster University and whose mom Merthyr was behind the keys at the local church for three decades, talked expansively and lovingly about the craft of songwriting, but also about the sometimes harsh reality of navigating through the music industry, and everything in between.
A Juno Award winner, prolific songwriter, movie composer and voice actor, and former Red Green co-star Thomas has joyfully embraced his creative life, his multifaceted career and the opportunity to talk about one of the subjects most near and dear to his heart – music.
Thomas said he was genuinely touched to be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and talked about what it meant to him as well how cool it was to be represented in such a diverse induction class for 2025.
“It’s kind of a lovely, warm embrace, I guess. There’s something about it that sort of feels like an epitaph of a Viking if the word ‘legend’ keeps popping up. I feel that’s a bit much. But it’s lovely to be recognized by your peers. I certainly love a lot of their work, so that has kind of a special meaning. There’s the crapshoot of radio and whether going with a record company is going to buy you bigger numbers of not. All of those considerations, even though it’s an addendum to the love of craft, most people I work with who are my age and still writing are in it for the love and the joy of songwriting. So to be welcomed into a hall of fame with a lot of writers whose work I’ve greatly admired is a treasure to me,” he said from his home in Dundas, Ontario, just outside of Hamilton.
“I love being inducted with such a diverse group of writers, in part because that’s what I grew up with coming out of one speaker in mono from AM radio that was playing everything from Dave Brubeck to the Rolling Stone, from The Beatles to Sinatra, to the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Honestly, the variety that I grew up with on radio was sort of like a writer’s encyclopedia. It was fantastic. And I do long for that variety again. Unfortunately, capitalism just marches forward, and it’s just become such a one-person programming now for the entire nation scenario. Everything’s filtered, mostly through Billboard Magazine. But it’s lovely to be there in the hall of fame with kindred spirits. It is a very unique and varied group of people writing songs. I don’t know that you wouldn’t find them on the airways nowadays.”
After making a joke about how and the the writer of this piece are starting to sound like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show talking about the ‘good old days’, Thomas got real about how the industry and business side of making music has always had it’s mercurial, mercenary, money-focused nature, so there’s really not much point in fussing and fighting about it.
“That’s how Murray McLauchlan and I met. Murray was grousing about not getting some damn respect in this business. I said, ‘respect from who? Weasels that are just interested in how many widgets they sold today’ And then we both started to laugh and so began a great friendship. Now, one could argue that there’s an incredible cross-section of stuff out there on the internet, but there’s no guide to it. Everybody and their uncle can now do a recording in their basement because the software is there. You used to have to do that in a million-dollar studio before. And there were the front-line filters of A&R people and record companies and the filters of program directors at independent radio stations. I really do miss a lot of that, but it’s always been an ugly business. I mean, it was founded on The Mob for God’s sakes – payola. And founded on exploitation of all those early Black artists too, to the point where Morris Levy was putting his name down as co-writer on all those great tracks on Roulette Records. Whenever you talk about the ‘good old days’ you don’t have to look too far to realize how rotten it was in many ways. So, in part, you’re always pining for something that never was,” he said.
“But we certainly had variety and that’s undisputable. Yes, it’s unfortunate that radio stations only want to play songs that were hits, and that’s pretty much how Canada programs. It pretty much follows the Billboard charts, as it always has in some ways. But it’s interesting, because I remember when CanCon [Canadian Content regulations that ensured radio stations played a certain percentage of Canadian artists], a lot of programmers hated being told what to play, and I couldn’t blame them. But it was really one of the only tools that our government had to try and ensure that maybe artists could have enough food to eat in Canada. I’ve been lucky to have met so many program directors who played my music because they wanted to. And I am so grateful for that. You know, I’d put an album out and the next day my single would be on the air. It was just like, wow. So I guess I am something of a spoiled brat in that respect.
“I remember talking to Gord Lightfoot. I spoke to him every few years and he would ask, ‘are you playing with a full band, Ian? I’m still playing with a full band, you know.’ He so loved the fact that he was paying with a full band at his age. And it was kind of a challenge, so I actually put a full band together in 2023 and started playing again. But when I asked Gord, I think it was about 20 years ago, when was he going to do a new album, he said, ‘why? Nobody will play it.’ And I realized what a wonderful era we had come up in where Gord wrote really good quality songs, and radio was ready for good quality songs. So they’d play them. But to hear such an amazing and truly legendary songwriter like Gord saying, what’s the point? I was a little disappointed in that because the joy of writing songs is just that. And you should not allow the horses of industry to drag you to the point of despair. And I think I was conscious of that at an early age. My general outlook was some people are going to love everything, and some people are going to hate everything. And the vast majority could lean one way or the other, and that’s just the reality of a human beings as a species with such diversity and with the infinite number of options in terms of music exploration. So I look at that and at 75 I think I’m a lucky bugger. I still enjoy it. I still love writing. I love getting lost in songs. And because I’m also a gear pig, a studio gear pig, as I construct the arrangements of songs, I can live inside those soundscapes. They take me somewhere. I think it was the German philosopher Schopenhauer who said that music was perhaps the most effective of all the arts because it can enter the soul without permission. What a fascinating statement that its. And it really does speak to how music is so transportive to us as being. I remember when my father died, Sting’s ‘Fields of Gold’ was on the radio and I bless him for that song. It’s interesting how we all have those songs that just move us. And they blindside us sometimes – you’re not expecting it. So that joy remains for me. And if anything, that’s what I hope to be celebrating with my fellow inductees. I hope the joy is still within them for all of it.”
As mentioned just above, Thomas is now 75, with a career going back more than 50 years to his self-titled debut album in 1973. Along the way he’s composed a catalog of songs that were hits for him, but also later became hits for other artists. These include ‘Painted Ladies,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘The Runner,’ ‘Hold On,’ ‘Pilot’ and ‘I Feel A Change Coming.’ His career has also seen him score for films and collaborate with other songwriters on fulfilling and commercially resonant projects such as the band The Boomers, and the ongoing Lunch At Allen’s songwriter’s concert series, which sees him joined onstage with fellow Canadian songwriting luminaries Cindy Church, Marc Jordan and his longtime confrere Murray McLauchlan.
But the story had to start somewhere. There had to have been a defining moment or experience that compelled the young Master Thomas, in the bucolic little town of Dundas, Ontario surrounded by books and ideas, to want music to be not just his passion, but his vocation.
“I was a fan of folk music initially. And what attracted me to it was the Pete Seeger story and how he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era in the United States and just went around to schools and played his songs in schools to stay alive. The songs were also about something. There was a social purpose to a lot of the folk music, the early Bob Dylan songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind.’ There was something philosophical going on there at the same time which always fascinated me. I am the son of a Philosophy professor. So it was always kicking around the house. As I learned to finger pick off an Ian and Sylvia cover of ‘Early Morning Rain’ I was motivated to try and write a song. And as I was writing this song, first of all, I was lost in it for hours. I wasn’t aware how much time had gone by. I realized though that my subconscious was spitting stuff into my consciousness. So, I was ‘somewhere else’ in the doing of it. And that remains. It’s what attracts me still,” he explained.
“When I was doing my most recent album [2024’s How We Roll] it drove my wife crazy because I was going over certain stretches over and over, and sometimes I was just caught in a loop of a mantra there as I was not only searching, I was also feeling what was coming out of the speakers into my ears. That’s how it all began. Now, I am definitely a benefactor of the Beatles bloom. There was such a bloom in the music business there that maybe a lot of guys like me were able to make a living because of it. There were umpteen record companies out there and there seemed to be room for everybody on the radio in those days. So, yeah, I benefitted from that Beatles bloom. And, honestly, what an ethnic soup The Beatles were. They were playing Gretsch guitars designed for Chet Atkins, for God’s sake, coming out of Vox British amplifiers and recording in a system were all of the professional studios in the U.K., they had really very technical people. They were singing with American accents, but they were from Britain. There was a real serious kind of hybrid of cultures. And, granted, initially their songs were basic stuff; ‘I want to hold your hand,’ ‘she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I mean, it was built on all the hormones of adolescence where people in the audience screamed until you couldn’t hear the music. So it was wonderful in that window of time that the business was great. It was also wonderful to see how those guys responded to the microscope, and how [producer] George Martin helped lead them forward into more complex music. And, boy, you cannot underestimate the import of that guy. He would hand out their harmony parts so they learned a lot of harmony on the run. They were riddled with harmony, but what George Martin imparted was magnificent. So to watch the evolution from It’s the Beatles! to Abbey Road – and that whole second side of Abbey Road is a masterwork – it’s more of an orchestra construct that a song structure. There are some song structures on that side too, but it’s so wonderful in its broad sweep. It was unheard of. They were just breaking the barriers down sonically, so when you heard their newest record, it was like, ‘what is that sound?’ They were experimenting so wonderfully with it all.
“Actually, The Kinks were as big a thing to me as a kid. When ‘You Really Got Me’ came on and I heard that guitar solo, oh man! I was an adolescent and that was an adolescent screech of ‘f*** you!’ And I loved it for that. It just summed up everything I was feeling, which was more or less confused by the world and what I was going to do, how I was going to fit into it. And was I in love or was it just a, you know, hormonal fantasy? And all of those big questions that hit you all at once in your adolescence when you’re thinking, well, where do I go from here. That song just allowed me to scream and let loose. So that’s when my head started moving off of sort of the puritanism of the Hootenanny and the folk songs. And it impacted me fairly heavily.”
Thomas got involved in music pretty heavily in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s and had a creative process fairly well entrenched. But then the universe spoke, and because of family commitments, (that whole ‘growing up and being responsible thing) Thomas has to get a day job, as it were. Fortunately, it still involved music, and in a sense added dimensions to his creative process, as well as technical, compositional and arrangement chops that he might not otherwise has accrued. This made him a more proficient, more productive, more prodigious, and ultimately a more successful and fulfilled songwriter.
“I had mouths to feed. I had a band on salary. So, I pretty well had to put out an album at least a year. Before that, when I wrote my first album, I was a producer at CBC. I had to get a straight job and left my band because my wife was pregnant. I went and became a radio producer at CBC producing live shows. The first one was Ivan Romanoff on a Continental Holiday with his chorus and orchestra. It was a 24-piece orchestra and 14-voice male choir live off the floor in Studio H, with an old rickety Ward-Beck console and a bunch of Sure pre-amps and to a mono mix that I would hear on the air two days later. It was such ear training. It was unbelievable. And while I was learning the fundamentals of production and engineering there, I started writing songs at night because I was also producing artists for the Transcription Records Series there. Sometimes I would see where some of their songs were going wrong and it was like a lightbulb went off. So I wrote my whole first album from nine o’clock at night until two in the morning after Catherine and the kids were asleep. And somehow, they managed to sleep through it all. And my process has remained relatively similar. It takes me about two weeks for my pumps to get primed, and that’s like being in position with instrument, pencil, paper in hand and sort of drifting in the cosmos,” he explained.
“I would write into the wee hours and you’d get those songs that were handed to you in a sense. That’s been, you know, called the unmerited grace of inspiration. It can land onto what you might consider the most unworthy person. The unmerited grace has no favourites. It lands on everybody at some point in time if you’re creatively seeking. Which is pretty humbling on one hand, because you realize you are plugging into infinity, and there’s a joy to that that has remained in my writing. I think probably it was a real bugger for record companies though. I was a hard sell because I wasn’t a particularly focused writer. I wasn’t charging down a certain persona like Springsteen or the would-be Springsteens, that whole slew of people who went for that aw shucks, jeans and t-shirt guy from next door thing, that very, very specific kind of Bryan Adams version of rock and roll. I was following wherever my writing took me, which was all over the map, like the music I’d grown up with. It’s a fascinating thing for me that I have many people coming up to me saying they loved a certain song but didn’t know it was me. Through everything, songwriting has always remained a joy for me.
“I rediscovered that joy in recent years. I put out an album called Levity on Warner Brothers in 1988 and it tanked. I thought it was some of the best work I’d ever done. I worked with Chris Neil, a wonderful British producer. There was a ballad on that album called ‘Back to Square One,’ which I thought was the best ballad I’d ever written. But the record basically stiffed and I figured I was done. Nobody’s going to want me now, so I started doing movie scores. But, in the midst of that, I started writing quirky little songs that came out of this ’64 Gretsch Tennessean that I bought from a friend. And this guitar just had some songs in it, and they had to be written. And that became the first Boomers album [What We Do, which came out in 1991, the first of four Boomers albums] which took off in Germany. What was interesting about that album was that at the same time, the Canadian review came out saying, ‘it’s just Ian Thomas with a bunch of sidemen.’ Then the German review came out and it said, ‘what an interestingly different group of musicians have been assembled to create this fascinating sound.’ And that’s what The Boomers was to me. The players were also unique, and I had hired them because I admired all their work. The game was to try and beat the demo, to do better than the demo. But with all of those demos, the writing of them, it was just an absolute joy sitting in the atmosphere of the sound that was coming out of this Gretsch Tennessean and wow. So, it hasn’t changed much. The joy of discovery remains the same.”
It’s one thing, one very big thing, to write a song, one that invokes your mind, body and spirit, then imbue it with your musical expertise, your literal voice, through the recording process and release it out into the world. There is a complexity at work in an artist’s soul that is pressing and immediate, and often quite self-judgemental to the point of existential. Starting with ‘Painted Ladies’ in 1973, through, ‘Coming Home’ (1977), ‘Pilot’ in 1979, and ‘Hold On’ the following year, there was rarely a period on Canadian radio where Ian Thomas wasn’t being heard.
So how does it feel when another artist takes that work of passion, put’s their interpretation on the arrangement, sings it their way, and releases it out into the world … and it becomes a big hit under THEIR banner (although you do have your name in small print in the credits, as well as on the royalty statement).
Santana recorded ‘Hold On’ in 1982 (rising to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart), while Chicago did likewise with ‘Chains’ that same year. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s rendition of ‘The Runner’ was a hit in 1984, while America’s version of ‘Right Before Your Eyes’ was likewise the year before.
“It’s interesting territory and the territory is twofold. One is that of an artist, and the other is as a writer. As a writer, you’re absolutely flattered that another artist is placing their career in the hands of your song. That’s a big commitment. But sometimes I feel badly about it. On the album Shango, Santana’s version of ‘Hold On’ was forced on them by the record company because they didn’t have a single. And record companies did not know how to market anything unless they could have the marketing done for them with a little payola and some radio exposure, right? Record companies were never fully invested in marketing. It was a very old system and they were used to it. So I felt badly that Carlos’ album couldn’t come out the way it was and the way he wanted it. I think that must have been artistically frustrating to them that they had this song handed to them that the label thought would work for them. It was the same thing with Manfred Mann’s cover of ‘The Runner’ [which was released just before the 1984 Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles, rising to #22 on the Billboard Hot 100],” Thomas said.
“My album. The Runner, was down at Arista Records for consideration for release in the U.S. And then I get a phone call from the guy who owned Arista, Clive Davis and he said, ‘you know, I think ‘The Runner’ is perhaps the most important song of the decade.’ And I realized, okay this is a grease job. Okay, what’s coming? And it was, ‘but I’ve got far too many artists already on Arista to take care of. I really want this song for Manfred Mann.’ I spoke to the manager of Manfred Mann who, when I met him, I said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you.’ And he said, ‘I bet you are. We’ve made you a lot of money.’ So, you know, there’s a sweet sadness there. And then for me as an artist, it was frustrating. Santana basically regurgitated my arrangement. And so it was an interesting experience. I never really knew what it was. Maybe it was my voice. A good chance it was my voice. Obviously, the gravitas of an internationally-renown band putting something out, people are going to sit up and look at it way more than they would coming from some bloke from Canada with a Gaelic-sounding name. All of those things were pieces in the puzzle, but now, as I’ve crossed Canada and I have the great joy of playing for people who grew up on my music and the scenario of somehow becoming part of the soundtrack of their lives, boy what a lofty position that is at 75. So, even though I was a little artistically upset that you couldn’t give me away in the United States sometimes, or even in Canada, that comes with the territory. I learned at a very early age, as I’ve said, some people are going to love everything you do. Some people are going to hate everything you, and the vast majority could care less one way or the other. And that’s a very sobering realization, because when you’re a young writer, you think everything you write is sacred. Then it takes you a long time to realize now, wait a sec, 99 per cent of writing is rewriting. So all of that in my evolution, the joy of creating music has always been there. What happens to it after the fact – that is what it is. All I know is that if you strap your wheels of creativity to the horses of industry, it’s going to be a rough ride for sure. And it’s caused a lot of writers to quit and get bitter when the industry is no longer interested in them, because they’re not the hula hoop – not the cool new thing. And I have met a lot of writers who gave up, quit working, and can’t be bothered anymore. And they got, very, very bitter. But I choose to look at the ride I’ve had and I’ve got nothing but gratitude. Jesus, what a wonderful time I got to come along in the post-Beatles bubble. It was just a magnificent period in time.
“And also, along the way, I was able to do film scores as well to help feed my family and other things that were fun, like silly character voiceovers for commercials, everything from Snap the Rice Crispy to Ned the Newt. It just seemed like there were always joyous little sidebars, like doing that stupid idiot Dougie Franklin on The Red Green Show. I mean, Steve Smith just called me up and said, ‘hey, do you want to come out and play?’ After a couple of seasons I realized that an actual actor should really have that job because it was like watching paint dry for me. Seven or eight hours of hanging around for 60 seconds of dialogue. But it was a lot of fun, plus I got to be on there with my brother Dave [Thomas of SCTV, Bob and Doug Mackenzie fame].”
Lunch At Allen’s is wrapping up it’s run after more than 20 years of regular shows, including five albums (If It Feels Right was the last one, coming out in 2017). As he said above, Thomas has gone back to his original rock band roots, touring with a full-on band every year for the past couple of years, which he said now will be his primary focus.
“We’re doing the Lunch at Allen’s Farewell Tour. I think it comes down to energy. I’m going to go back out with full band and do solo dates. It’s so much fun hearing the arrangements of my songs fully rendered for a band. The Lunch at Allen’s format is a lot different. It’s a very folk-driving thing where we’re all backing each other up and we get to be sidemen and background vocalists. And all of that is great fun. But I do miss full band and some elements of rock and roll. I love electric guitar. It’s just a fascinating instrument. There are so many things that tone wise can be done with it. So how much energy have I got at 75 becomes the question, right? And my wife needs me more than ever at home. So I’m reducing my touring now to my solo band a couple of times a year.”
The conversation wrapped up with a story about John Candy, who is now the subject of a heartwarming, tear-inducing Prime documentary I Like Me, and one that Thomas has regaled audiences with from the stage many times before – but which now has added poignancy because of the emotions being stirred by the cinematic presentation of the beloved comic actor’s life.
“I got to know home during the Firehall Theatre days in Toronto, the days of Second City with my brother, and then obviously bumping into him a fair amount over the years. One time he called me to underscore his directorial debut. It was a Showtime pay-per-view movie called Hostage for a Day with George Wendt from Cheers. But I also remember getting a phone call from John once, and it’s like 1:30 in the morning. I pick up the phone, and I hear, ‘Ian?’ I said, ‘yes, who is this?’ He says, ‘oh thank God. It’s John Candy. I’m in Calgary and I went out for something to do and I saw this advertising thing that said, Ian Thomas appearing. And I went to this place and it was like a really shady hotel. And there was this beat-up looking guy on the stage singing bad folk songs. And I asked the bartender, is that Ian Thomas? And he said, well, it’s AN Ian Thomas.’ I guess John wanted to double check that I hadn’t become some tragic Ray Milland figure from a B-movie. So he called me And when he got me on the line he said, ‘I am so glad you’re here and not here.’ So funny.”
For more information on the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, please visit: https://www.cshf.ca.
For more information on Ian Thomas, including upcoming touring plans, visit: https://ianthomas.ca.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
