Alex Lifeson picks the most difficult Rush song to record: “Pretty intense”
There aren’t many bands like Rush. They are the onion of the musical world. If you take a Rush song and you want to try and get to the core of it, you are going to have to peel back a lot of layers in the process and doing so might bring you to tears. That’s all part of the appeal, though.
When people listen to Rush, they know that they aren’t going to get another musical experience like it. They end up hearing something equally complicated and beautiful, and the band plays with various time signatures and playing techniques, unafraid to approach large concepts in their work when putting together what kind of music they would like to make.
Naturally, by having such an open-minded approach to music and being so ambitious in their work, there have been a lot of tracks that have proven difficult to record. There aren’t any Rush songs that have been easy for the group to make because of their innovative approach to music, reflected in the fact that when Alex Lifeson, the band’s guitarist, was asked which track was the hardest to lay down, he laughed and said, “Everyone.”
However, after being given a moment to think about it, he remembered one track that still haunts him today. “The one that comes off the top of my head would be ‘Natural Science’. That was pretty intense playing, and in the studio, we would play things a million times before we were confident we got the best take,” he said, “so playing that particular song a million times was challenging.”
The track is a nine-minute odyssey from the band’s 1980 Permanent Waves album. It’s about how people leave behind nature in pursuit of technology and features some of the most bizarre time signatures that Rush has ever tried. The piece fluctuates in volume and goes from 7/8 to 6/8 and 4/4 at a whim. There is so much chaos contained within this song, but in typical Rush style, it’s chaos they manage to hold on to and use to their advantage as the track, despite being hectic, also has a great beat to it that is hard not to head rock to.
Not only did the band go out of its way when putting together the instrumentation for the song, but they also went above and beyond to create natural sounds that filtered into the theme of the track. For instance, producers Terry Brown and Kim Bickerdike went to a lake and recorded the sound of splashing oars to get some of the noises for the beginning of the piece.
Rush are a true gift to music as a band who have always been entirely unrelenting in their attitude to pushing themselves creatively. The million takes necessary to get ‘Natural Science’ might have been strenuous, but upon listening to the song, they’re 100% worth it.
Listen to ‘Natural Science’ by Rush below.
