First of a two-part article featuring Paul Hoffert, founding and continuing member of Lighthouse, who talked to Music Life Magazine about the band’s career, legacy and the creation of their most successful album. Part one looks at the album itself and the new version recently released by Anthem.
By Jim Barber
When you look through the list of achievements and credentials earned and accumulated by Paul Hoffert, his time as the co-founder of classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse is only one relatively minor component to a life filled with inventiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, development of leading-edge technology, his foundational role in the development of the so called ‘new media’ and being a groundbreaking and inspiring teaching academic. Oh and he also spent decades crafting award-winning and critically acclaimed motion picture soundtracks.
Calling him a polymath is a bit of an understatement. Scan his biography or even his Wikipedia page, and you come upon stories of his work with the National Research Council of Canada, his development of high-tech programs at York University in the 1990s, his renowned and respected expertise in the realm of development, cataloguing and transmission of online content. He’s also the founding member of the Canadian Independent Record Producer’s Association, an organization which has become even more vital in the age of streaming, downloading and he hollowing out of the major label infrastructure.
As we turn to 2026, the 82-year-old visionary is still a member of the Screen Composers Guild of Canada, the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, the Glenn Gould Foundation, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund and Sistema Toronto, a program that encourages intellectual and creative development of children from underrepresented backgrounds. Yeah, and he’s written eight books about music, new media and technology.
Whew! Impressed yet!?!
On top of all this, even after nearly six decades of being in and around the music industry, Hoffert still loves nothing better than hitting the stage with his current bandmates in Lighthouse a couple dozen times a year, playing songs from that band’s classic repertoire which have become iconic in stature and meaning, emotional touchstones for the Baby Boomers, and pivotal to the nascent rise of Canada as a rock music power back in the day.
After waiting until just the right moment, and with the right package to offer fans both new and old, Lighthouse released a special anniversary edition of their seminal 1971 album One Fine Morning through Anthem Records towards the end of 2025. It is highlighted by a special three record vinyl edition and a double CD package, which features not only the first modern remix and remastering of the album, but also the first time a number of songs that were recorded during the One Fine Morning sessions have ever been heard. There’s also a few demo versions of songs that did make the cut, some of which are at the same sonic and melodic standard as the finished product, demonstrating the band’s unwavering and insistent push for musical perfection.
Hoffert, as the last remaining and by far the longest tenured member of the band, was in no hurry to re-release the album, which kind of goes against the grain with many bands and artists, who routinely reissue their music, often with only the slightest in alteration and with negligible bonus features. A new version of One Fine Morning was only going to come out if it was something of value.
“The short answer might be, I guess, we’re just not that smart and not that, you know, having our finger on the pulse of everything that was happening. Because in the interim of years, the one thing that all our audiences and fans have been asking for is, how do we get the records? How do we get the CDs? How do we get the LPs of all those great albums that you play stuff from when we see you perform live? And it finally dawned on us and our record company, Anthem Records and Tapes, that we should do these re-releases, but without trying to be cute about it. One of the reasons that we didn’t do it before is that there’s nothing new about just taking something old and repackaging it and putting it out again. Nothing wrong with it, but our fans wanted to know not just what we did, but they wanted to know how we did it and why we did it. So we were looking for a way to add value with extras to provide that stuff. And then it took a while to finally figure out what to do because we had to go through the archives of what existed and what survived over all of this time. And it turned out that the key to how to do this, first of what hopefully will be a bunch of re-releases, was we found 10 tracks that had never been released before,” Hoffert said.
“Mostly they were demos that were submitted back in 1970 for the original One Fine Morning LPs that came out in 1971. And out of those 10 demos, five of them had been rejected by our producer, Jimmy Ienner, and never made it onto the One Fine Morning album. Previously there had been three albums, but that was the first one that went gold and had two singles, one of which was ‘One Fine Morning’ that were very, very popular. And those songs that didn’t make it on, when we found them, were incredibly interesting for me because I realized that the fellas in the band that did the demos, which was most of the guys in the band at the time, submitted material. So, unless you played on somebody else’s demo, we had never heard those other songs. It was so interesting to hear what people had submitted that never made it. It was also interesting to hear the five songs that did make it on the album, in their original state. So I’ll give you an example of each of those. On the ones that didn’t make it on the album, there’s this wonderful song called ‘All God’s Children,’ written by Larry Smith, who was the trombone player in Lighthouse at the time, and by Howard Shore, who of course was a saxophone player and now a multi-Grammy award winner as a film composer [Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit]. So Howard and Larry had written this song and the demo was fantastic. It’s amazing.
“I don’t know exactly why it was rejected, but for whatever reasons, the producer, Jimmy Ienner, felt it didn’t fit his criteria back then for the album. Because as people who listen to music nowadays, it’s basically about singles that get dropped one at a time. And in those days, it was all about the album. So you had to come up with songs that fit what this album’s concept was about. Whatever it is, it didn’t fit. It’s a fantastic song and people will find it interesting. In terms of the demos for songs that did make the album, an example would be the hit record ‘One Fine Morning,’ written by my co-founder, Skip Prokop [who died in August 2017], who, when he wrote the demo, sang the song. And I think he just played acoustic guitar on it. I played conga drums or something like that. When you listen to that and then compare it to the hit record, ‘One Fine Morning’, with our new lead singer at the time, Bob McBride, and the horn charts and the string parts and all of that, it’s really interesting to hear what happened from the time somebody has a concept and submits it till it gets fleshed out and played and recorded by everybody. So that’s when we figured, OK, this might be really interesting. Why don’t we package all of this new extra material with this new remixed, remastered, super fidelity of the other stuff? Also, every single time that the pressing plant presses another one of these special edition LPs, before the press comes down and presses the record, it takes a bunch of different colored dots from the colors on the album cover, throws it on the glob of plastic, and then makes a unique LP, every one of which has a different pattern on it. So the LPs are great for not only that LP sound that people like now, but it’s also great if you’re a collector, because your disc is going to be absolutely unique and different than everybody else’s disc.”
Music Life Magazine, for most of it’s interviews, will ask about the resurgence of vinyl over the past few years. As with much of the conversation with Hoffert, the answer was as erudite as it was comprehensive – again, which should come as little surprise when considering his pedigree.
“Okay, here’s my take. And I produced not just a bunch of the Lighthouse records, but dozens and dozens of other LPs over the years. And my take is that there’s some things that people don’t always realize. The first thing that’s very important is that in the 1970s, when LPs were hitting their peak, the biggest difference, I think, for consumers, for listeners, for fans, was prior to that, they only had 78 RPM and 45 RPM singles, single records. Sort of like when people now drop songs on the internet and get individual songs. All of a sudden, there was this idea of a collection, because you could fit 10 songs or more on an LP. Artists could put together material that related to the other material in whatever way the artist felt that it should or it might, including the order of the songs on each side. And lots of time was spent doing that. That concept of a group of songs, a collection of songs that the audience could listen to, combined with all of what I call the real estate, which is the physical size of an LP, where you could have little booklets that you put in it, where you could have lots of photographs, things that weren’t sound, was crucial. You could put reviews, you could put comments on collections, on LPs. We got comments from all the guys who are still alive today for the reissue. And you can put all of these things either on the album sleeves of an LP, or you could put it into little booklets, made for a more immersive, more complete experience,” Hoffert explained.
“But there were problems with LPs at the time that were self-inflicted by the music industry, by the record companies, not the artists. The most important limitation was that the cost of making a pressing of an LP depended on two factors. First, how much plastic was in the little blob that went into the press, which we measure by how much the weight of that puck of material. Typically, the weight of those things had been, when LPs were designed, about 200 to 230 grams. The record companies found that they could get away with using about 170 grams. And not too many people complained that the sound wasn’t as good. But when you made the impression, the grooves couldn’t go as deep as they would have gone using thicker vinyl, because of that, vinyl developed what we used to call the Rice Krispies effect, which nowadays is a term that people don’t talk about – the snap, crackle, and pop, or the hiss and pop. And the other problem that you had was, when you made a really deep impression with the heavier biscuit or puck, if you wanted to put more bass on the album, bass frequencies, low frequencies, you made the grooves a little bit wider, and that would make it louder. But once they used wider records, and you made the grooves a little wider, the record would skip. So the LPs in those days had technical shortcomings that have been fixed, because when they resuscitated the LPs that are pressed nowadays, most of the LPs that are pressed went back up to 200 to 230 grams, like our release. We had one of the heaviest ones. So the records sound a lot better. And a lot of the advantages that people got with CDs, that it was much clearer and all of those things, today’s LPs actually sound a bit better.
“And the other thing has to do with a deficiency in the sound of an LP that people really find a benefit. They prefer it. Deficiency is when the cutting head of the lathe that makes a master of what’s going to be the LP, if the high frequencies are very prominent, and you can hear very crisp and very lifelike high frequencies, then sometimes the cutting head will burn out because too much voltage goes to it in the high frequencies. So they have to have a compressor and compress the highs. And in the low frequencies, if you put too many lows on, even in today’s LPs, what happens is you get the record skipping a bit. By having a heavier disc kit and doing all of those things, you have a combination of better sounding LPs, but also LPs that sound different from CDs. For many people who have really expensive hi-fis, they prefer that LP sound. It’s a warmer sound. So you can look at it as a deficiency, or you can look at it as, you know, EQ, or however you want to look at it doesn’t matter. And that’s the reason that people are doing it. LPs are better. And of course, we’re back to getting to the concept of collections of albums, which had gone by the wayside over the last 15 or 20 years. Because the internet, you go to iMusic or any of the streaming services, and it’s a song by song thing. It doesn’t force you to listen to a collection in that order. And when you get the LP, it has that. That’s my take on it.”
The title track for One Fine Morning is arguably one of the most played songs ever on Canadian terrestrial radio and continues to get millions upon millions of ‘spins’ on various streaming and digital platforms as well as on radio. Interestingly, the song almost never made the album, with the aforementioned producer Mr. Ienner believing it was too long in duration to generate mainstream radio airplay, which was the lifeblood of record sales ‘back in the day.’
“Skip and I never had any idea, but we thought we did. We had ideas of what we thought were going to be hits, but they were almost never resonant with what the audience out there wanted. At one point we said, look, we’re going to sit down and write a hit record, right? ‘One Fine Morning,’ that’ll be a hit. No, ‘One Fine Morning’ was rejected at first by Jimmy Ienner, the producer of the One Fine Morning album, and it would have been one of those things that was rejected because Jimmy was really focusing on, back in 1970, when we recorded the album, making it radio friendly. And in 1970, radio meant AM hit Top 40 radio. And the reason that that’s very important is that a year later, when automobiles started getting FM radios in the cars, you had FM radio and Prog Rock and all kinds of famous stations that could get you airplay with formats that weren’t two and a half minutes to three and a half minutes long with a verse and a chorus and a hook and all of those kind of poppy formats that we were forced into because of the technology of that day. Since this was way before the internet, the only way people could know to buy your record is either you heard the band live, which was very limited, or you listened to it on a radio. So the first three Lighthouse albums had long songs, a lot of instrumental solos because we were a big band and we had all of that, but they didn’t fit that. So for ‘One Fine Morning,’ the big hit single off of this album, Skip looked at me when we went in the recording studio and he said, ‘I think we need to have a jazz piano solo in this because we always had.’ We were a jazz band, we always had solos,” Hoffert said.
“Jimmy Ienner said, ‘no solos, they’re too long, they don’t fit the radio format.’ So we had to cut out the drum solos, the sax solos, all of that kind of thing, the violin solos. But Skip says, why don’t we put a piano solo on and if it’s too long, we could always cut out the piano solo. And Jimmy said, ‘okay, I think this is a good song, I’ll let you put on the piano solo, but I may take it off when we release it.’ So we put ‘One Fine Morning’ with that piano solo out, and when it came time to release the album and Jimmy started getting comments back from radio stations, many of which were FM, about should we do it without the piano solo or with the piano solo? The comments came back and said, no, don’t cut out the piano solo and don’t cut out those extra bars at the beginning, which are just a bass solo playing, boom, boom, ba-dum, boom, ba-dum, boom, boom. You know, that wasn’t radio friendly at the time. And he said, we’ll see. And so the first single that we put out wasn’t ‘One Fine Morning’ because it didn’t fit the format. We put out a song called ‘Hats Off to the Stranger.’ And once it broke Top 40 radio, the radio stations started playing without it being released as a single, One Fine Morning with the piano solo without it being released as a single, until finally the label released the single.
“So there were actually two versions of ‘One Fine Morning’ back in 1971: one without the piano solo and one with the piano solo. And what the radio stations ended up playing was the one with the piano solo and with that little bass intro. But did we know that that was going to be the single? No. And years later, a few years later, when we recorded ‘Sunny Days,’ Skip and I didn’t think that would even get on what turned out to be the Sunny Days album [released in 1972]. Skip had written this silly little line, ‘sitting stoned alone in my backyard, asking myself, why should I work so hard? Sitting dreaming about the days to come, half undressed and just sitting in the sun.’ It was a cute little ditty that was very poppy. But when I heard it, I said, ‘oh, this sounds like a Count Basie blues kind of thing. Why don’t I put this like that?’ By the time we recorded it, it became a hit single. But no, we didn’t predict it. So you’ve heard the long answer, and now the short answer was – we never knew.”
For more information on the anniversary re-release of One Fine Morning, or Lighthouse touring plans for 2026, visit https://www.lighthouserockson.com.
Read about how Hoffert and Prokop met, the early years of Lighthouse, more about working with Jimmy Ienner and the rise of Lighthouse alongside their contemporary jazz/brass influenced bands Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears in Part 2. Click here for Part 2.
- 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 bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
