Second in a series of 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
In the latest of a series of well-deserved accolades, the members of Triumph – Rik Emmet, Gil Moore and Mike Levine – are being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame as part of a ceremony that also includes fellow inductees Ian Thomas, Andy Kim, Jane Siberry and Gino Vannelli.
This latest honour follows in the footsteps of the band’s elevation into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Juno Hall of Fame, Canada’s Walk of Fame and more! The band, which became legendary for their powerful and bombastic live shows, including performances at some of the biggest festivals in North America (The US Festival, Texas World Music Festival, The World Series of Rock) as well as for their superlative musicianship and effervescently uplifting, empowering and energizing compositions, helped solidify Canada as a rock music powerhouse, and even though the band has only played two full shows and made a couple of short live appearances in recent years, their music is still a mainstay on most rock radio platforms, and is even being used to pump up sports fans before important televised games in 2025.
It’s a legacy that is not just about the past, but also about the present, as well as an intriguing future – but more about that later.
The idea of what would become iconic Canadian rock music power trio Triumph sprung forth in the fertile mind of drummer/vocalist/songwriter Gil Moore and bassist/keyboardist Mike Levine. Although still quite young, both were veterans of the Toronto music scene of the early 1970s, with not only years of live show experience, but also loads of experience working the ins and outs of the business side of the music business as well as developing an acumen for the technical side of recording studios and live production.
“They were trying to put a band together and they saw me play in a bar band called Act Three at the Hollywood Tavern in Etobicoke, Ontario in the summer of 1975. And, according to legend. Levine leaned over to Gil and said, ‘this is the guy.’ They had been looking for a frontman, guitar player, singer kind of guy that could write songs and stuff. And they had a record deal with Attic Records. Mike had connections to Tommy Williams and Al Mair of Attic, so that’s how it started. We had a kind of trial in Gil’s basement where we got to play with each other, and then we sat around and talked and yeah, I gave Act Three my notice and started with Triumph in September of 1975,” Emmett said.
“And it’s not like everything clicked right away. It’s a process. You click in small ways and that’s how you see a future together. Nobody had a pot to piss in at the time, so you’re all willing to make compromises and collaborate in order to try and get things off the ground. And it’s all an adventure – there’s excitement and energy and ambition. All of those things were shared, so there was a lot of clicking. I thought they were so smart and so knowledgeable and so good, because I was just a bar band musician, and a jobbing musician. These guys had a vision that was much more ambitious than that, and they were more experienced. I mean, Gil Moore knew about bank loans and knew about how to wire a P.A. together. I remember thinking, okay, there’s a lot I can learn here. So I was clicking from the get-go. Artistically and creatively there was a thing where I kind of had to, right from the beginning, get them to focus more on the music and their instruments. They had chops, it was just a question of dedicating more time and energy to them. That was an uphill fight, but I think by the Just a Game album, which came out in 1979, that was when, three years in, where I was asserting myself and saying, ‘here’s some songs that I’ve written that I think we should record. And here’s the way I want to record them.’ So I was taking some of the reins away from Mike as producer and arranger, because I felt like I was really starting to learn things as an artist and that’s, I think, when the band really started to figure it out.
“And the process unfolds over time and it changes over time. When you start out, everybody’s sort of willing to collaborate and compromise in order to make it all happen. And then after you’ve been at it for a while, like in Triumph’s case, after a decade there’s lots and lots of money and there’s business and there’s partnership things and there’s a studio [Metalworks] and there’s all of this stuff now, there’s production companies and there’s warehouses that have rent every month and truck drivers you know. By then it’s no longer about kids in the basement with a dream of being in a rock band.”
But along the way, through nine studio albums, starting with their self-titled debut in 1976, followed by Rock and Roll Machine, then the aforementioned Just A Game, 1980s Progressions of Power, the band’s breakout Allied Forces album in 1981, Never Surrender in 1982, Thunder Seven two years later, followed by Sport of Kings and the band’s last album with Emmett, Surveillance in 1987, Triumph carved out a reputation for the powerful, uplifting nature of their songs, their brilliant musicianship and for arguably having the most incendiary, intense and massive stage show outside of Queen, anywhere in the world.
Songs such as ‘Hold On,’ ‘Lay It on the Line,’ ‘Magic Power,’ ‘Fight The Good Fight,’ ‘Never Surrender,’ ‘Follow Your Heart,’ ‘Somebody’s Out There,’ and ‘Rock and Roll Machine,’ continue to be staples on classic rock radio, and are also being exposed to a new generation of fans with them being used as opening teasers for both NHL hockey and The Toronto Blue Jays. Therefore it makes sense, in an article about songwriting being honoured, to talk a little about how some of these classic Triumph compositions came to life.
“The way it was imagined that it would be structured was that Gil was going to be bringing half the songs and I was going to be bringing half the songs. And that’s sort of the way it played out. And then the band would sit in pre-production rehearsals and arrange things with Mike sort of being the overseeing producer kind of guy that would be making suggestions about trimming this part down, let’s get to the chorus quicker, that kind of stuff. As time played out, Gil and Mike ended up spending more and more time marketing the band and promoting the band and managing the band and production and all the millions of things that have to be done. So I would be coming down to rehearsal and I would have 10 songs and Gil would have a couple of ideas on his Dictaphone that were a quarter of a song, half a song, and we’d work them up. It reached a point when we got to the Thunder Seven album and the thinking was, okay let’s try to collaborate a bit more. Let’s sit together like in the old days and try to write songs together. So that album had a little bit more of that back and forth between Gil and I and Mike coming in again sort of at the end to help put arrangements together and get them ready to record.”
Triumph’s music was always set apart from much of what was happening in hard and heavy rock throughout the late 1970s and 1980s in that it wasn’t about outright hedonism, nor was it dark and gloomy. It was deliberately empowering and powerful and was an energizing musical presence on radio which translated into inescapably wonderful concert experiences.
“That’s what I was saying around 1978, when I was writing ‘Lay It on the Line’ and ‘Hold On’ That was me saying, ‘the band is called Triumph. Well, why aren’t we about that. Why isn’t that what we’re sort of hanging our hats on.’ And where did that come from? I was a kid who sang in choirs; when I was seven and eight years old, I sang in church and school choirs. So I was around the whole idea of the anthem and how they all bring people together. And also choruses should have something where there’s a refrain that makes everybody want to sing. One of the first albums I ever bought was a Bob Dylan record, and Bob Dylan had these folks songs that had the same kinds of qualities where it has to arrive at a refrain, like ‘the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,’ and by the time you’re doing the third chorus you don’t even have to sing it anymore because the whole audience in the coffee house is going to be singing it back to you. That idea is as old as songs, when troubadours were singing and telling stories of what was going on at court for the common people in the marketplace,” Emmett said.
“In Triumph, I think that was me saying to the guys, come on, let’s do this. So then it became where I was pretty much always trying to write songs that would function along that line. And of course by the time we got to ‘Magic Power’ I kind of figured out how to be able to do it in a way that was, you know, very effective. And it wasn’t like I was doing it because it wasn’t a natural, organic kind of songwriting process for me. This is what I wanted to be able to say. Like, once you’ve been up on stage in front of 10,000, 12,000 people and they’re all banging their heads and they’re all thrusting their Bic lighters into the air, you start thinking, okay, how much do I want this to be like Communion and how much of this do I want to be like a Nuremburg Rally. I think I want to lean more towards Communion you know, so that’s a conscious thing, that’s a premeditated kind o thing. But at the same time, it was pretty organic coming right out of my genetic structure.”
‘Hold On’ as Emmett has stated, epitomized that positivity, that collective sense that not only are we all in this world together, but that we are meant to be happy, meant to strive, meant to persevere. And it led to the iconic songs of empowerment that have become ingrained on the psyche of millions of fans around the world … as well as helping maintain Triumph’s status as Canadian rock and roll royalty.
“With ‘Hold On’ it isn’t so much a mishmash of ideas coming together as it was being like what the Beach Boys did. I mean, who didn’t love the Beach Boys, right? When Brian Wilson was writing things like ‘Good Vibrations’ he had a vision of making it like a symphony, but he was going to make it happen over two and a half or three minutes. There were all of these great musical things that happened in a very short period of time. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ was like that. There are so many of his tunes that had a symphonic kind of imagination at work. That was one of the things with ‘Hold On’ where I was thinking, okay, I’ve got this poem that I wrote in high school that was saying ‘music holds the secret.’ So we’re talking about music. Where do we go from here? As a writer sitting alone in my room, I came up with the whole idea of the arrangement. This is how it’s going to develop. Kind of like how Jimmy Page had done ‘Stairway to Heaven’ where it went from being kind of a folky little ballad and then picked up steam. And the guitar solo at the end is still amazing, and FM radio at the time was totally into this idea of songs starting soft and building it up – turn it into a symphony. I even wrote a kind of disco breakdown part of it. The disco thing was like, I can’t remember how many bars it was but I said to Gil just play on this high-hat and I will play guitar over it. It was like, 32 bars or 64 bars or whatever. And by that time I was confident enough in the studio where I could say if it’s too long, well we can cut the tape. Like, I’d never cut tape before, but I’d seen it done and now I knew, oh, okay you can even rearrange things by cutting the two-inch master.”
Then we come to ‘Magic Power,’ which, exposing bias here, is the writer of this article’s favourite song – ever!
“I wrote a folk song, sitting at home. And I probably was leaning an awful lot on the fact that when I was a kid in high school, we would play The Who’s Who’s Next album a lot. So ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and “Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and all that stuff. ‘Magic Power’ was kind of a song where I was thinking, okay, The Who was essentially a power trio with a singer up front. Let’s see if I can write something that’ll work the way Pete Townsend makes songs work. I think when I originally wrote it, I added the part where it says, ‘she climbs into bed and pulls the covers over her head,’ but it wasn’t a she, it was me. It’s what I used to do when I was a kid. I used to have a transistor radio and go to bed and listen to the radio, which I think was one of the formative things about making me think that, yeah, become a musician, that would be a really cool thing. You can get on the radio,” Emmett explained.
“Of course if you write a song about being somebody that has this magic power of having songs on the radio, radio itself is going to go, ‘isn’t that a great thing! This is what we do.’ And listen, I’m not going to pretend that was an accident. And if you think about it, at the same time, more or less, Rush had ‘Spirit of Radio’ and there was a lot of that going on where everybody was trying to figure out how do you get on the radio again? How do you make this happen?”
While Triumph was known for, and this article is talking a lot about, certain songs that helped elevate them to a certain level of acclaim, popularity and commercial success, at their core, Emmett, Levine and Moore created albums – full albums that had an internal structure, dynamism and emotional connective tissue that made them more than just a sum of their parts.
“There were always a few tracks on each album where you know they’re going to be the focus tracks. Especially when you are looking at which one will be the one we make the video for, for MTV and later MuchMusic. But we always thought of Triumph as an album band. And consequently there would be songs that there would be no point in playing them live because a certain amount of people are buying the tickets because they want to hear the hit songs because they’ve been following you for five or 10 years. They want to hear those big songs. That’s why they came to the show. And when you play the first couple of bars of it and the audience goes, ‘yeah, that’s what I paid my money for. Great!’ You’re going to do that song, and that’s a beautiful little piece of energy to get when you’re up on stage. But there are other songs that we didn’t play live, but I still think are great songs, or at least the experience behind them was amazing,” Emmett said.
“And example of that would be the last album that Triumph did when I was in the band [Surveillance]. It was not very commercially successful and kind of came and went unnoticed. But at the time, I had Steve Morse [Dixie Dregs, Deep Purple, Kansas, Steve Morse Band] up and I’d written a song called ‘Carry On the Flame’ which I thought had some darkness in it. It has some real kind hipness too in the way it was arranged. It was kind of prog and was all of these things that I’ve been talking about, the symphonic kind of thing. And of course it went completely unnoticed. No one ever asks me about it or talks about it. But I was quite proud of it. And as I said, Morse was in town and we did a co-write. The song had an intro thing called ‘All The King’s Horses’ which Morse and I wrote in an afternoon sitting on the studio floor at Metalworks. And it was one of the greatest moments of my career. When I look back at it, I think, what a highlight that was to be writing with a guy of that skill level and that experience. He played in Kansas and he played in Dixie Dregs and he played with incredibly great musicians all over the world. And here he was, sitting five feet from me and we’re playing acoustic guitars together, writing a song. And I remember thinking, ‘how great is this! This is all I ever wanted out of my life and my career,’ and yet it went absolutely unnoticed by the rest of the world.”
At a certain level of success, and Triumph was at a place through the first half of the 1980s that few Canadian bands/artists outside of Rush and Bryan Adams had attained, outside pressure becomes more intense than the inside pressure to just get better as songwriters. It’s the age-old dilemma, the tug of war between art and commerce that plagues every creator from visual artists to novelists, to screenplay writers and musicians. Navigating it can be treacherous and is often the primary reason why bands break up. The proverbial ‘artistic differences’ are often due to that dichotomy of interests between making good music and making popular music, become first a crack, then a rift, then a chasm.
“Around that time the business was changing. You needed to sort of be on MTV and you needed to have songs that would cross over and be power ballads on AM radio. So there was pressure that didn’t just come from the record company, it came from the world in general, what was being successful out there now and you say to yourself, ‘right, we have to compete.’ I mean it’s a First World problem. There are, and have been, artists who do a pretty good job of saying, ‘I can do this.’ Like David Bowie, he could always make really interesting music. If you’re talking to a comedian, a comedian would say, it just boils down to this: are you funny? Just be funny. Just do what’s funny. And I think for musicians and songwriters, it’s really, just be interesting. Just be really good. Just figure out how you’re going to capture people’s imagination. That’s what you have to do. Your work is to do that, and the other stuff is part of it, I guess. David Lee Roth once said the music business boils down to haircuts and shoes, and it’s a pretty good shortcut of a saying. Of course style is going to play into it. Fashion is going to play into it. Cultural memes are going to play into it. There are all of those things and then you’re also thinking, ‘what is radio playing now?’” he said.
“There are always these conversations and you can’t be 100 per cent shutting it out. You can’t ignore the world. But you do have to be able to sit down with your instrument and your brain and figure out how you’re going to capture the public’s imagination. What are you going to say and how are you going to frame it so that it’s interesting? It’s no different than when you’re writing an article. You’re going to decide what the lede is and what is relevant and interesting for the reader. This is the way things work. There’s going to be a certain amount of formula there because human nature really doesn’t change all that much. You want to be hip. You want to be cool. So you’re going to have to take some of that into account. We were talking about greed and people wanting to mine the past because in truth, there are really, really high-quality things that even new generations will find interesting. You have ‘Lay It on the Line’ played during the hockey playoffs and then you’ve got nine-year-old kids using Shazam wanting to find that song. There’s gotta be something in that song that’s able to speak outside of it’s own time. So there must be something interesting about that, whatever it is that we did, that’s making that phenomena happen. There’s gotta be something in that song that’s able to speak outside of it’s own time. There must be something interesting about that, whatever it is that we did, that’s making that phenomena happen.”
While the other 2025 Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees are still writing, recording and performing to varying degrees, Triumph as an entity has not released new material since their Emmett-less 1993 album Edge of Excess, which featured current Bon Jovi axe-slinger and Canadian guitar icon Phil X in his stead. But after a busy few years which saw the band inducted into a number of halls of fame, releasing a well-regarded documentary (Triumph: Rock and Roll Machine, 2021) performing a short set at a fan event in 2019) and performing a short set before a playoff hockey game in the spring of 2025 (minus Levine), and even more recently the release of a tribute album, not only is there a resurgent interest in the band from fans and the music industry as a whole, but it also seems to have reenergized Gil Moore in particular.
Moore is the visionary of the band, the driving force who started Triumph more than 50 years ago and whose acumen for the business, his tireless efforts to make the band into the epic live phenomena that they became, and who constantly pushed for bigger and better things for the band. As mentioned in a previous interview with Moore in Music Live Magazine (https://www.musiclifemagazine.net/the-stars-come-out-to-honour-triumph-on-new-tribute-album/), plans are underway for what has been dubbed, at least as a placeholder, Triumph 2.0 – a mix of live performance, high tech avatars and more.
“I know that the latest update I can give you is that there’s a guy named Jason Murray from Vector Management handling the band. Gil used to manage it, but he’s partnered with Vector, who handle things like Peter Frampton and Lynyrd Skynyrd and others. He’s a Canadian guy but he’s sort of international and he also manages bands like The Glorious Sons, Our Lady Peace, different acts like that. So, he’s very heavily connected into the world of Live Nation. There’s so much happening these days. I just saw a think the other day in, I think it was Forbes Magazine, or some sort of business finance thing, rating the fact that the music business is forecasting big growth in the next couple of years. And the projections are not based on the sales of recordings or what we traditionally think of as the music business, but the fact that the live thing is exploding. I mean, you’ve got Rush announcing they’re going back out and they’re going to tour with a new drummer. So they’ve added youth and are re-energizing themselves. So, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to me that Triumph would now ride these kinds of things. Somebody’s going to come along and say, ‘okay, here’s the deal,’” Emmett said.
“Now, do I think Mike Levine is going to be able to tour and strap on the bass and play stuff. I doubt it. So this is where the whole animated, hologram, 3-D stuff enters into it. And Jason was telling me a story about going to The Sphere in Las Vegas and seeing John Mayer playing Grateful Dead stuff with some Grateful Dead people. And of course people like Jerry Garcia have passed away, but he said it’s really great the way they integrate footage of Jerry playing. And I just saw a clip the other day on Instagram of Brian May sitting and plunking away on a 12-string acoustic and then looks up to the big screen and here comes Freddie Mercury to sing ‘Love of My Life.’ So there’s a way that you can now use technology to integrate from the past to the present. So, you know, this is the future, and we’re living in it.”
Of course this sent the interview off down the rabbit hole of examining the good and bad of technology, especially how AI may become used not just to augment musical artists – but perhaps replace them. While Triumph as a band may or not me making new music, Emmett definitely is … and has never stopped.
“I’m pretty sure that everybody you’ve talked to whose going into the Songwriting Hall of Fame would be leery of anything that’s not sort of organically honouring the history of the songwriting process. I do think technology has created a world where there’s a lot more of the, let’s use the word mash-up to describe the idea of taking ideas from different styles and different genres and different technologies and then being able to create something new. I’m all for that. I think that’s fantastic. When we talked about the Ten Telecaster Tales album that I did [https://www.musiclifemagazine.net/digging-deep-into-the-heart-and-mind-of-an-artist-rik-emmetts-ten-telecaster-tales/] the whole idea of recording straight off the floor, clean as a whistle, and then going into the box and saying, okay let’s see what we can do with all of the plug-ins that exist for universal audio etc. etc. There’s an infinite palate of technological colours that you can apply, and I am cool with that. I am not cool with AI generating the original content,” he said.
“Like, I’ve got 11 songs in the can right now, and they’re folk songs in that I can it down with a guitar and I can make those songs happen. And that may be the way that I eventually realize them as quote, unquote, product. You’ve got to turn it into something that people can listen to and access on their phones and click on in their computer. Ever since they invented the wax cylinders back at the turn of the 20th century technology is the way music gets delivered and distributed. That’s not going to change. And you have to be comfortable with that as a creator because that’s how you eventually sort of make money. But having said that, I’m not keen on having technology be the thing. There’s this whole thing, too, of art being something that has to have a kind of ethical morality at work in order for it to maintain its integrity. I think that’s crucial. I would hate to think that what the world would end up being is a place where we’re just going to keep re-synthesizing and using technology to do things with stuff that came before. I think that every succeeding generation has a responsibility to be chasing the music and trying to make art happen. So the idea of regenerating something for its own sake, that’s just because of the money. Somebody somewhere is greedy and that doesn’t interest me very much.”
Returning to something more organic, more real and more fun, Emmett said he loved the opportunity to play a few Triumph songs live with Moore, and an assemblage of all-star Canadian rockers in the outdoor concert before one of the Stanley Cup Final games in Edmonton earlier this year. It was also a cool experience for die-hard Triumph fans in that they got to see Emmett share the stage, and share licks, with Phil X, who replaced Emmett in the band for a short time, including recording the band’s final studio album, Edge of Excess.
“It was a fun adventure. It was amazing. It was great. And you know, Phil X is a crazy rock and roll dude. He’s about as California rock as you can kind of get, for a Toronto Greek guy. And I really enjoyed being around him and playing with him. It was great. And, you know, Gil was kind of struggling but we had another drummer there [Brent Fitz] so it didn’t matter. I told him he didn’t have to kick the bass drum super hard or whatever, the other guy’s playing too, so just have fun. Point at me with your drumsticks every now and then. So he did, and we were laughing and it was really kind of cool. It was an adventure, you know,” he said.
“I got to meet Todd Kerns [Age of Electric, Slash, Toque] and Brent Fitz and I thought these guys are awesome. These guys are pros, 100 per cent professionals and it was just pure joy up there. It must have been the feeling you’d have if you’re sitting in with Benny Goodman’s band and somebody gets Charlie Christian up on the bandstand and the other musicians are going, ‘wow, this is awesome.’ I thought, wouldn’t it have been nice if my career had had a little bit more of this happening. So it was good. It was a really sweet feeling. And that’s why I think it’s great that Alex and Geddy are going back on the road. I think it’s 100 per cent fantastic, incredible, wonderful. I love seeing them together. I know Alex, but I don’t know Geddy at all. I’ve spent time around Alex and he’s a character. He’s a real artist and a bit of a wild card kind of guy, but also very smarty, very talented – really good. And the drummer they’ve picked [Anika Niles] holy shit, she’s amazing. So it’s going to be great and it’s going to be so much fun.”
What should also be a lot of fun is the opportunity for Emmett, his bandmates Levine and Moore, to not only share the spotlight, but also share the opportunity to swap stories, kibbitz, catch up and share a few laughs with their fellow inductees at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame Legends induction event, this Friday, Oct. 17 at the Lyric Theatre in the Meridian Arts Centre in downtown Toronto.
For more information on the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, visit https://www.cshf.ca.
For more information on Triumph and their future plans, visit https://www.triumphmusic.com.
- 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 jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
