The prog rock song Geddy Lee said will last forever: “That song doesn’t age”
Time is always the great test of any good rock song. Even though it may suit the moment when you play the piece for fans, the real power behind a track is whether it will stay relevant after you listen to it for another 30 years. While most prog rock musicians have made music that feels like the equivalent of a museum piece half the time, Geddy Lee admitted that he is still transfixed and listening to Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’.
Gabriel could have chosen to stop making music after Genesis and his legacy would have still been secure. He had already made some of the most daring progressive music of his time, but just because he decided to take his foot off the gas a little bit didn’t mean he had to stop entirely.
While Genesis soldiered on with Phil Collins, Gabriel’s work became a completely different animal. It was still progressive rock, to be sure, but there were flirtations with everything from world music to pop songs that would have had no business being on one of Genesis’ 1970s records.
Although Gabriel’s self-titled debut is still shaking off the cobwebs of prog-rock, ‘Solsbury Hill’ is where both the pop and the prog side of his sound crystallise for the first time. The track is definitely a pop song with its tumbling fingerpicking pattern, but it is really unconventional for its time, being one of the first hits since Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ to be written in 7/4.
What separates songs like ‘Solsbury Hill’ from much of progressive rock is their emotional accessibility. The complexity is present, but it never announces itself as the point of the exercise. Instead of asking the listener to admire the mechanics, Gabriel invites them into a feeling first, allowing the odd time signature and unusual structure to reveal themselves only after repeated listens.
That balance between ambition and immediacy is something many progressive artists struggled to achieve. Too often, the music leaned so heavily into technical display that it lost its sense of human connection. Gabriel’s genius was recognising that experimentation did not have to come at the expense of warmth, and that a song could be intellectually curious while still feeling personal and direct.
For Lee, this kind of change was wildly inspiring, telling Global Bass Online, “Every time ‘Solsbury Hill’, by Peter Gabriel, comes on the radio, I remember where I was when I first heard it. That song doesn’t age because it’s so well written. There is something so right about it.” Considering Lee had started with early Genesis in his record collection, he would spend his career trying to take that ambitious prog side even further.
Because when you look at a group like Rush, none of their pieces exactly scream ‘PLAY ME ON THE RADIO’. The power trio were more known for their episodic songs that told a story, but somewhere around the 1980s, the band got their chance to show their pop side just as much as Gabriel could.
Since ‘Solsbury Hill’ was written in 7/4 for most of its runtime, Rush did him one better on the song ‘Limelight’, which casually switched between 7/4, 4/4 and waltz time depending on which section they are playing. The band never sound like they are trying to do it intentionally, usually just putting different chords together that sound right and tying them together in the best way they know how.
“That 7/4 rhythm works well because it feels like a normal rhythm but isn’t quite right,” Gabriel explained in Sounds magazine. “It’s not like a clever rhythm, just a bit odd. It’ll be interesting to see how people dance to it.” But, the song also sticks out for another reason, it is a rare autobiographical moment for Gabriel’s discography.
Even though many artists have toned down their tracks to suit the format for the poppy single, what Rush and Gabriel have both done is the perfect combination of simple and complex. It might be hard to nail down, but getting people to sing along to a song that they can barely count right is a true art.
