The album Neil Peart said Rush would never make: “We would see it as a sacrifice”
Part of the ethos of prog rock has always been to flex your musical aptitude in one way or another and stretch the boundaries of what is considered rock music, and this is one of the many reasons why Rush is so adored by their fans.
Since the 1970s, the band have endeavoured to push their sound as far as possible. Both individually and collectively as a trio, they’ve never been afraid of showing off their skills, and yet, they remained capable of producing songs that still felt coherent and accessible rather than needlessly complex, with some of their albums being regarded as lavish masterpieces that blended symphonic arrangements with densely layered composition.
However, while nothing ever seemed out of their reach as a band, there were also seemingly some golden rules that they didn’t wish to break, so as not to sacrifice their integrity as a band. If you’ve formed a band with a strict ethos in mind, then you’re likely to want to stick to this in order to ensure the longevity of the project, which is exactly how the Toronto group operated.
It wasn’t necessarily that they feared they would step too far outside of the realm of accessibility, nor that they would ever be able to create something that would end up alienating their fanbase, but more that they felt as though committing to making a specific kind of record would prevent them from being true to themselves.
This is why, during a 1991 interview with Powerline, drummer Neil Peart was asked as to whether they’d ever consider helping to make a soundtrack, which he responded to with ambivalence, as it was something they’d always sworn they’d never attempt together as a group.
“If we were to make a soundtrack album we wouldn’t consider it a Rush album,” Peart argued. “We would want to be free to go off into atmospheric ideas or things that a good soundtrack musician creates to supplement the action on screen. So it would make it necessary for us to do a little sidestep I think from the main thrust of what we do.”
He continued by saying that there would potentially be a set of circumstances in which they may consider it, but that it remained off the cards for the foreseeable future. “That’s the reason why we would be a little bit resistant,” he added, “Unless we were convinced I guess that the project was worth making that sacrifice for, because I think we would see it as a sacrifice of devoting our time to a Rush album as opposed to a separate ambition.”
Of course, this has always been the collective stance of the band, and there’s no use trying to convince them otherwise, as they don’t believe it would be beneficial to them as a group to pursue something like this.
However, the question remains among fans as to whether they’d be able to pull off something like this, and given the conceptual nature of records like 2112 and how it undulates through different themes and motifs, you’d have thought that doing a soundtrack album would be the exact sort of thing Rush were primed for.
