“Hold On” by Triumph

On Just a Game, their 1979 album for RCA, Triumph handed their fans a pep talk, and "Hold On" also went out as a single that climbed to number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. Rik Emmett wrote it the backwards way: he was crooning open vowels over some chord changes, the sustained notes turned into the words of the title, and once he asked himself what he was holding on to (his dreams, it turned out), the rest of the lyric grew out of the hook. The opening verses go back even further, to a poem he wrote for English class in high school.

Emmett has said that watching crowds go wild at Triumph shows made him wonder what the band was really giving them. A group with that name, he figured, owed its audience something positive: songs that leave people feeling better about themselves.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.