It’s fair to say Rik Emmett is back – in a big, rockin’ way.
Emmett and his rebranded solo group RESolution 9 is releasing a new album, entitled RES 9 worldwide on both physical and digital formats through European label Provogue/Mascot Label Group on Nov. 11.
According to the opening lines of the press release, it is apparent that RES 9 is no ordinary rock album, that besides some incredible guests and a focus on creating an incredible piece of recorded music, it’s afforded Emmett the opportunity to do a little soul searching and to ponder some deeper, more existential thoughts through his musical muse.
“I don’t feel like I liberated myself in any amazing sort of way. But I think it was really revealing, a really kind of searching process to be going back to Metalworks and be making a rock album, an unapologetic rock album. And to be in the position where someone has given me the kind of respect and enough of a recording budget at 62 years old, which I was when we started, to make a really high-end record, with guests who are really respected rock stars,” Emmett said.
“So what does that say about me? Well, it feels nice, it feels gratifying. And it says that this music and these songs better be really good. I’d better bring my A game.”
Emmett was approached to do the record by an executive from Netherlands-based Mascot Label Group, which contains an impressive roster of musician/songwriters, including axe masters such as Robben Ford, Joe Bonamassa, Eric Johnson and Robert Cray, as well as bands such as Black Stone Cherry, VolBeat and Canada’s Monster Truck.
“The whole thing came about fairly quickly in terms of deciding to do it, going ahead and getting started, pre-production, production and all that stuff, and then delivery of the final product for release. It has actually been quite a roller coaster ride. The thing was I had a pile of songs; I am always writing and things accumulate in my songbooks. For the last couple of years my long-time musical partner and friend Dave Dunlop has been whispering in my ear when we were on the road doing our duo gigs saying, ‘you should make another rock record and I should produce it and it will be the best rock record you ever made.’ And I was like, ‘yeah, maybe.’ But I wasn’t sold on the idea,” Emmett said.
“One night we were in Pittsburgh and I got a call from Jim Pitulski who was the A&R man for Mascot in North America and he said that they were interested in me making a record for them. And I said, ‘really, what kind of record do you want?’ He said, ‘you can do whatever you want. But you know I am a huge Triumph fan and Ed Van Zijl the president of the company is a huge Triumph fan and you know we would like something like that, and also have some guests on it, some Canadian guests.’ And I asked them, ‘um where is the money going to come from for all of this.’ Jim said, ‘you don’t have to worry about that. We’d like to give you enough money so that you can do it properly.’”
Emmett said he and Pitulski conversed frequently by phone and by email and after chatting with Van Zijl himself, and doing some due diligence and heavy pondering, decided to forge ahead with the project.
“It was great because Ed said he had no expectations. He said he wanted to give me the freedom to do whatever I wanted, that he wanted to make sure I could do it right and that he would stay out of the way. They never wanted to hear a demo; all they wanted me to do was sign away everything, which I did. So they took global rights and publishing and all that stuff, they sent me the cheque and I took Dave and my bass player Steve Skingley who is a producer and engineer on the side, and away we went [RESolution 9 also features veteran Canadian drummer Paul DeLong who previously worked with Kim Mitchell],” he said, adding that in an interesting twist of fate, a flood had wrecked his own basement studio where much of the recording would normally had taken place. In its place, Emmett decided to record the album somewhere that had a pretty impressive pedigree and a great deal of personal history for him – the aforementioned Metalworks, the studio built for and used by Triumph for most of their career.
“And this was in April, so we started rehearsing the songs and we mixed and delivered the album in the second week of July. But it was like old times. It literally way, going into the studio every few days and having long sessions. I had maybe been back there once or twice since I left Triumph in 1988 and then we did go there to rehearse and get ready for those shows in 2008. But other than that, this was the first time I had been back in almost 30 years to work on music at that level. The place has changed a lot: every time I go in there Gil has changed something around, although Studio 1 remains pretty much the way I always remembered it.”
The suggestion to have Dream Theater vocalist/songwriter James LaBrie appear on RES 9 was an inspired one, but Emmett admits it actually came from folks at the record label.
“The record company came along and wanted some guest to appear on the album and said ‘if we give you enough money do you think you can get James LaBrie of Dream Theater [originally from Midland, Ontario] to sing on it. And I said that I didn’t know the guy, but if you know the guy and can get him I think it would be great. They said he was a big fan of mine and he did a great job,” he said.
One of the songs LaBrie is featured on could be said to be one of the signature tracks on the album, especially in terms of the quite searching, existentialist theme of the whole project and Emmett’s approach to it.
“There’s a tune called I Sing. It’s a song I started writing about a year and a half ago. And it was a song where I was just asking, why do I do this? Why have I been doing this my whole life? Why did I want to do this when I was an eight-year-old boy singing in the church choir and in the school choir? And why do I still do it? Why does anybody still do it?” he said.
“And it ended up being kind of a laundry list song: I sing for this reason, I sing for that reason. But then you kind of put it all together and make all the phrases go and make all the words rhyme and then think, ‘hey that’s a pretty good tune.’ And then along comes James LaBrie to sing on it. That’s pretty cool.”
When the suggestion for having guest artists on the album first came up, it was thought that a unique feature of the guests would be that they would be fellow Canadians. Therefore, besides LaBrie, Emmett himself reached out to fellow Canadian guitar legend Alex Lifeson of Rush who played on the song Human Race, the first single from RES 9.
“I can tell you that I will always remember May 16 as one of the great days in my life. There was an Alex Lifeson guitar session in the morning, lunch with the boys and a photo session and then James LaBrie singing my songs in the afternoon. I was like, ‘geez, that was a lovely day in the studio,’” he said, adding that with both Rush and Triumph forming and building their early reputations in the Toronto of the 1970s, their paths crossed many times.
“Alex and I go way back. He came to see Triumph play at the Gasworks in like 1976 and I saw him play there with Rush in maybe 1973 or 1974. And Alex is a great guy and sweetheart of a human being and obviously a very talented fella. It was a pure pleasure working with him; we had a lot of fun.”
And while there was a significant amount of chatter and ‘buzz’ about what some have called a Triumph ‘reunion’ on the album, Emmett dispels the notion that this is another step towards a bigger return for the legendary Canadian power trio. Yes, all three members of the band – Emmett, drummer Gil Moore and bassist Mike Levine – indeed played on the bonus track Grand Parade, but folks should understand that it is actually meant to be a sentimental closing of the Triumph chapter and nothing more.
“I think Gil felt like when we had gone through that process and we played those two shows back in 2008 [at Sweden Rocks and Rocklahoma] that was it for him. He closed the book; the circle had come around for him. For me, when Jim Pitulski from the label was talking about guests he said ‘well, what about the Triumph guys?’ And I said ‘what about the Triumph guys?’ And I guess as a fanboy he would really love to be part of something that has a recording reunion by Triumph. They wanted to lead with that song in their promo. And I said hold on, we needed to push it to the millions of people who are Facebook friends with Rush and Dream Theatre first. Once I got it straightened out I told them, ‘yeah, I’ve got the right piece of material,’” he said.
“I had a song that was this kind of melancholy Jeff Beck instrumental kind of thing and I thought I could write an appropriate lyric for it. Gil, Mike and I get together every year just before Christmas since we sort of reconciled back in 2007. We go out for dinner and sit around and Gil catches us up on the Triumph business such as it is. And we tell a few stories and have a few drinks and wish each other a Merry Christmas, and it’s a nice thing. And every year it becomes a little bit more mellowed around the edges, the stories lose some of the details and pick up a bit more myth, which I think is human nature. I thought maybe there’s a lyric in that, maybe there’s a song in that. So I wrote the tune and I demoed it with the guys in my own band, went around and talked Mike and Gil into playing on the song. But we were never actually on the studio floor all together at any point. Gil said, ‘give me an afternoon and I will book it with the engineer, I don’t want anybody looking over my shoulder, I just want to work on my own.’ And then Mike and my bass player Steve Skingley spent an afternoon together and Mike cut his bass part in a two or three hour session and boom, it was done. There wasn’t much else added to it. I think Steve played a little keyboard part on it and Dave played some tasteful, subtle little guitar fills over it.
“So that was, for me, the closing of the circle. That one brought it all the way back around. Here were the three guys again, and a song that was kind of loosely based on the whole Suitcase Blues, Just a Game thing, and the freedom that they gave me back in the day to do something like that.”
Emmett said Levine and Moore always allowed him to indulge himself and his various guitar influences on many Triumph albums, taking the music into genres that he would later explore in much greater depth and breadth throughout his accomplished and prolific solo career.
“It was something, I tell you. Here I am back in the Metalworks Studio and it’s all these decades later and by God the three of us are going to do a song. But it’s a song about being older and wiser and there’s a little bit of melancholy and a little bit of sadness. It’s also a fairly sophisticated little tune, if I do say so myself, in terms of chord changes and the lyric. And I am proud of this song and this album as it shows the level of maturity I think I have reached in my craft and what writing songs for 50 of my 63 years on this planet has taught me,” he said.
“And I like the fact that Gil and Mike are a part of that – all of that stuff. It’s like with those guys we rode that f***ing crazy rocket ship for 13 years and watched it rise and then crash and burn. And there is something to be said for that; to be able to go back in time and say, ‘yep, this is who we were, this is what we were.’ And what perspective do we have on that now? So I think Grand Parade fit right into the whole vibe of the album in a way.”
Sonically, Emmett also wanted RES 9 to have the feel not just of early Triumph albums, but of the sort of music that inspired him to become a musician in the first place – particularly the blues-infused hard rock emanating from the U.K. in the late 1960s.
“When I was producing the album with Steve and Dave I said I want to get back to that. I want that to be a part of the songs and the way the record sounds. It’s got to have a lot of Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton in it, which is funny because that’s one thing that Alex Lifeson and I really bonded on when he listened to the stuff. We cut our teeth on that; that’s where we started. Making this record brought a lot of this back full circle for me,” Emmet explained.
“I want the music to mean something again in the same way as when I was a kid and we all got the new Deep Purple album and we’d smoke a joint and pass the album cover around and look at the credits and the lyrics and listen to the whole thing, both sides, over and over again. Music was a ritual that was part of our lifestyle and part of our culture. Here in North America it’s still like that to a certain degree but those kinds of people have been relegated to almost a sub-culture. People have their noses stuck in their f***ing phones. It’s a different kind of world, but in some places here and certainly more so over in Europe, it’s still there.”
And Emmett isn’t afraid to get a little topical on the new album as there are some references to a certain presidential candidate 
and the whole – excuse the expression – shitstorm that represents the current election process south of the border.
“The song Ghost of Shadow Town was literally inspired by the thought of what he [Donald Trump] is about. What is that all about? It’s just all about fear. That song is about him: he feeds the ghost, that’s what the guy is all about,” he said.
Ultimately, getting back to the fundamental outcomes of the album for Emmett as an artist, it was a journey of self-discovery to a certain extent – or perhaps more accurately, a journey of re-discovery.
“You asked what I discovered, well I rediscovered who I discovered when I was discovering I am this guy in spandex pants jumping around the stage in a band called Triumph. But then it became this thing where I was like, I play music and I make music and I always did because it makes me feel better, it makes me feel more alive, it makes me feel that life is worthwhile living. I would go to church and sing in the choir but the religion never really moved me anywhere near as much as the music did. It was the music that I think got you that much closer to God. So on a very substantial, deep level music had that juice of life in it for me. It was the big reason for living,” he said, adding that that joy is often reflected in the hopeful tone of many of songs, especially classic Triumph compositions such as Magic Power, Hold On, Fight the Good Fight, Never Surrender and Take a Stand.
“I don’t necessarily see the world in such bright shades of happy colours these days. It’s a little more pastel and there’s a lot more greys and I am older but I don’t know if I am wiser. Maybe I am more cynical. So now when I paint a musical picture I am going to have to take all that cynicism and heartbreak and all of the things that life teaches you over the long haul and put that into my art. And the question is how do you do that and still come back to saying, ‘but music is still worth it, and life is still worth it?’ So that was one of the things that making this album taught me.
“I am still an old-school optimist deep down. I am enough of an optimist where I say that you just have to hang in there and keep doing what you do and things will come around. That’s the leap of faith or the act of faith. You just keep doing that and eventually something good will come of it for you. So how do you make yourself happy? Well, you don’t always make yourself happy. Sometimes you make yourself sad. But then if sadness comes and disappointment comes and grief comes, how do you then turn around and say that you’re not going to give up? That you are going to keep kicking at the can?”
Emmett admits that each person has to try and answer that question for themselves, ultimately.
“For me at this point in my life, what came along? Mascot came along and offered me all this money to do an album. Are you f***ing kidding me? Out of the blue this is going to drop into my lap now? Why? But f*** it, I am not going to ask why. I am just going to move forward. I don’t know the answer to the bigger why question, all I know is that these guys are giving me a chance to kick the can again. And I guess when I do kick it I am going to try and bend it like Beckham,” Emmett continued.
“And I get that this may be the last chance I get to do something like this. I have told Ed, the president of the label, I don’t give a shit if I don’t see a penny of royalty out of this. I don’t care. But what I really do care is that I would like him to sell enough of them that they pick up the option on my contract and I get another chance to do it again. Let me have another good day and that will be enough.”
Fans will get a chance to experience much of what Emmett is talking about not only when they listen to RES 9 but also seeing his band perform live. A very special album launch concert is taking place on Saturday, Nov. 26 at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, featuring Emmett and his band playing selections from the new album, as well as classics from his solo and Triumph catalogue.
For more information on the show, or to order tickets, visit http://www.livingartscentre.ca/theatre-performances/rik-emmett-17
For more information on Emmett, other tour dates and RES 9, visit https://www.rikemmett.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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