“The key difference”: The only concept album Rush ever made
Are you even a prog band if you don’t do a concept album? It seems to go part and parcel with the whole title that at some point, you’ll decide that merely making songs in 17/6 about galaxy-spanning space battles isn’t enough. Such an exciting story, with such rich characters, not to mention your drummer’s demand for a ten-minute marimba odyssey, means that this is a tale that needs to be told over a whole album. One would imagine a band like Rush being first in line to do this as well.
After all, they are, above everything else, poster children for a certain strain of prog that lends itself to this sort of pulpy storytelling. The likes of Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Peter Gabriel era Genesis always fancied themselves as artistes. They made songs informed by classical music virtuosity and avant-garde boundary-pushing. They were intensely boring smart-arses, is what I’m trying to say, whereas Rush were actually, y’know, fun.
For all my snark, Rush were one of the very few bands that legitimately managed to dance the whole prog dance without any unearned pompousness. Or at the very least, a minimum of unearned pompousness. The technical chops are there and are legitimately dazzling, especially in the case of legendary drummer Neil Peart, but most of the time the band were more Star Wars than Star Trek. That is, dealing in visceral thrills and emotional highs rather than more heady, slow-burn affairs.
With all that in mind, they must have a few concept records to their name? I mean, if Styx felt like they had the chops to chance their whole career on a half-baked rock opera, surely Rush could pull it off better? Well, that’s just it. Fittingly enough for a band with a song called ‘Working Man’, Rush were always a lot more down to earth than their peers and thus, only made a single rock opera. Unlike Styx, they didn’t embarrass themselves with it either.
What was the sole concept album made by Rush?
This isn’t to say that Rush have only done conceptually linked music once in their career. The titanic first side of 2112 is an extended 20-minute symphony of continuous music. The final track of A Farewell to Kings is a ten-minute suite titled ‘Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage’, and you’d best believe there were follow-up books on later albums. However, they wouldn’t make an entire album connected by one single unifying storyline until much later in their career. This was no accident either.
In an interview with Spin, bassist and lead vocalist Geddy Lee talked about the band’s 2012 album Clockwork Angels as their first foray into making a true concept album compared to what came before. When asked what set the album apart from their previous records, Lee said, “It felt different this time. I think because we were taking the approach of making the songs work as individual pieces, we didn’t have to worry about the necessity for an overture or trying to bring musical themes back. That approach would’ve felt formulaic to us.”
He elaborated on that further, saying, “The three times we attempted side-long concept pieces in the past, the music was really like one song broken up into many parts. The thread connecting the music on Clockwork Angels is the storyline. That’s the key difference.” What’s more, where so many had chanced their arm on a concept album before they were ready and fell on their face, Rush went one better.
By waiting until they were ready, Rush went out on a high. Clockwork Angels may have been their swansong, but they went out with one of the best-received, best-loved albums of their entire career. A sign of what you get when you do as Rush do, and don’t let your ambitions cloud what you’re actually capable of.
