The emotional song Geddy Lee refused to release: “Out of respect”
Songwriting almost tends to be too personal an exercise for artists to do. Most professionals might be able to make a raw song out of just a couple of chords and their personal feelings, but sometimes tracks should stay in the vault because they are far too raw for primetime. Although Geddy Lee usually left all of the emotional music to Neil Peart whenever performing in Rush, he thought that his own song ‘Gone’ was far too emotional for him to release when he released his own solo album.
But does it really make sense for anyone in Rush to make a solo album? The entire thought of the power trio having ideas left over after throwing everything but the kitchen sink into their classics is one thing, but still having space left over for an entire album’s worth of material was bound to be interesting for the bassist.
Although Lee had been the group’s face for years, they had come close to calling it quits when first running through the album Vapor Trails. While it felt like the group could have gone on until the end of time, Peart had the rug pulled out from under him when his daughter and wife both passed away in rapid succession, leading to him taking a sabbatical from music and driving all around the US.
Lee and Alex Lifeson weren’t just going to spend time sitting on their hands, and in those years, Lee had amassed a collection of songs that would become a part of his solo record, My Favourite Headache. While someone like Matt Cameron of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden could never match what Peart did on a record, not every track was meant to be a prog epic.
This was an excuse for Lee to let off some steam, but out of respect for Peart, he ensured that ‘Gone’ didn’t make the track listing. Considering his friend had weathered the greatest tragedies anyone could face, Lee felt that it wouldn’t be appropriate to make a song about grieving loss with a wound that was still raw.
Speaking with Louder, Lee consciously decided to leave it off his solo record, saying, “One of them was written right after Neil’s daughter Selena had passed away. The song is called ‘Gone’. It’s a song about loss. And even though it’s not exactly about Selena, it reverberates because it’s about all those losses, and what you feel when someone in your life is suddenly gone and you’re left with these feelings that you can’t make sense of.”
While Lee was more interested in talking about lighter topics, it’s not like Peart would sidestep any of his own emotions. Across Vapor Trails, half of the record sounds like the drummer working through his grief in real-time, almost as if getting all of his energy out in song was a way for him to heal from the trauma rather than be too exploitative.
Then again, would we expect anything less from Peart? His entire writing process was about finding out who he was outside of the celebrity bubble, and even if he had a lot to unpack, he made sure that he came out on the other side as a stronger person. Lee may have made a song that fit in with what Peart was saying, but at the time, the story he was singing wasn’t really his to tell yet.
