Lay It On The Line

Triumph's best known song

Hanging on the wall of Studio 1 at Metalworks studios.

It’s no secret I love Triumph. I’ve already written a lot about them. Re-watching the documentary about them and visiting Metalworks reminded me that this post is sitting in draft.

Recorded before Metalworks came into being at Sounds Interchange Studios in Toronto, this song is a hard rocker with a soaring vocal by Rik Emmett, a catnip combo for me. It’s the most recognizable of Triumph’s songs today and set the band’s sound. Rik Emmett is first and foremost a guitarist and he plays a blistering solo in the middle that shows off his virtuosity. The album this comes off of, Just A Game, was the first to break internationally.

Rik Emmett in his book Lay It On The Line (yes, he uses this song as the title) talks about the creation of the song.

I can’t recall if the verse or the chorus arrived at the beginning of the process, but I do recall that the chorus progression felt like it climbed up, so I wanted the verses to feel like they were moving down. I had a cinematic kind of imagination for this. I could hear the guitar overdub layers, the harmony vocals on the chorus. I knew the guitar solo would get built over a bridge harmonic construction (which I was borrowing from my guitar piece “Petite Etude”, which came from the classic diatonic cycle of the baroque era, updated by jazzers on the standard “Autumn Leaves”). Domenic Troiano used to refer to the three power chords b6, b7, and Im as the “money chords”, so I wasn’t inventing the wheel here. Those chords were in the guitar solo of “Stairway”, Hendrix’s “Wathchtower”, and Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll Hoochi Koo”.

I like that the lyric is about a guy asking for honesty. The subject, the content, and the style that frames it up has worn well. And forty-five years down the road, it’s still a pretty good title for a memoir.

Let him teach you how to play it.

Here’s Mike Levine talking about the song. He describes the recording process as really smooth. It’s really fun when he rocks out to the guitar solo.

Enjoy your song of the day!