Rik Emmett didn’t rush back to Triumph. He had to be talked into it, pitched like a reluctant investor, and the closing argument didn’t come from ticket projections or streaming data. It came from his wife.
The band had been assembling their case for a while. The NHL had started using a Triumph song during the Stanley Cup playoffs. The reaction was strong enough to move metrics — the band hit number one on Shazam. Gil Moore and Mike Levine came to Emmett with all of it laid out. He took it home.
“So I go to my wife, who’s the ultimate authority on everything for me. And I go, OK, honey, they’re talking about going back on the road. And she goes, let’s do pros and cons.” The first proposal he offered: he’d have to hire a trainer and get back in shape. She stopped him there: “She said, stop right there, bro. That’s a good enough reason. I don’t need to hear any other reasons [Laughs].”
He’s been going to the gym ever since. There’s a personal trainer. There are ten-pound weights, which he admits with a laugh he’s calling “women’s weights.” And there’s the matter of the double-neck guitar — thirteen pounds on the shoulder — which is precisely why none of this is optional.
Rehearsals with Moore started in January, with the wider band coming in March. That wider band is significant: Phil X, Todd Kearns, and Brent Fist join to flesh out what Emmett cheerfully calls the first-ever six-piece power trio. The dynamic is new, but Emmett has thought carefully about how it needs to work.
“I really want those guys to feel like shareholders — stakeholders — in what this is. It’s not ‘they’re sidemen playing Rik‘s songs.’ This is becoming your song now, too. You have to invest yourself in this.”
He’s not just being diplomatic. The argument he’s making is actually about what makes the songs matter in the first place. The Triumph catalog has outlasted the band’s original run precisely because the music found its own life, in arenas, in sports broadcasts, in the playlists of people who weren’t born when some of these records came out. Phil X, he says, is already holding on to it.
“The fans sit out there and go, this is the soundtrack of my life. I’m not going to let this go. And you go, OK, good — because this guy Phil, who’s an unbelievably great guitar player, he’s holding on to it, too. And he’s going to make it happen for you.”
The scale of what’s coming is not lost on Emmett. Toronto has seen him in intimate rooms, with an acoustic guitar and a jazz sensibility. Arenas are a different proposition: scripted, production-heavy, built on grand gestures rather than quiet moments. He acknowledges the difference, but doesn’t seem rattled by it: “When you’re doing a big show, it’s grand gestures, and it’s lights, and it’s production, and it’s scripted. You’ve got to hit your marks. This is where the flashpots go off. It’s like being in a play more than improvising.”
The physical part is what he’s working on. There are moments in rehearsal, he says, where he catches himself sitting down and has to remind himself to get up, move around, find the rock star posture again: “I spread my legs in the rock star pose, and I lift my guitar up, the grander gestures. And I go, all right — I have a lot of motor memory for that. I’m comfortable in that skin.”
He invokes Keith Richards and Mick Jagger to make a point about how two completely different kinds of performers can occupy the same band. Emmett knows which one he is — the one who runs around with a Flying V between his legs — but he also knows there’ll be space for the other guy in there too.
Relearning the catalog has been its own strange experience. Moore will reference something from a record, and Emmett will find he’s forgotten it entirely. He listens back, watches his own hands on the old footage, and something clicks: “It’s like you’re rediscovering yourself. And maybe this is what Alzheimer’s is like — everything’s new again. Everything’s fresh. I’m making fun of it. But it is an interesting and enjoyable process.”
He remembers Neil Peart describing the same thing after Rush came back from time off — the band sounding, in Peart‘s words, like a bad cover version of themselves for the first two weeks. Emmett recognized it immediately: “There’s a lot I’m going to have to remember.”
What’s keeping him going, beyond the trainer and the rehearsals and the logistics of a major tour, is something more personal. His grandchildren — who call him Bubba, not grandpa — have never seen this version of him. His family knows the acoustic shows, the intimate sets. They don’t know the arena: “To share this across two generations — what a beautiful gift. What an unbelievably great thing to have happen.”
He pauses, then adds the caveat that’s pure Emmett: “I just hope I don’t fall down and split my pants.”
There’s a poetry book coming too, written during COVID, published through ECW, built around an alter ego called Alvaro Fallas, who lets him say things that optimistic arena rock never quite permitted. But that’s a different conversation. Right now, Triumph has a chapter left to write, a tour to deliver, and a guitarist who’s been doing women’s weights for two months to make sure he can carry a thirteen-pound double-neck guitar across North American stages.
He’ll be ready.
