The Rush album Alex Lifeson called weak: “It was a weird record for me”
Guitarists can usually be the biggest critics of their own work. While there’s normally a bit of ego at play in the studio when someone wants their instrument louder than everything else, there are just as many times when people want their tracks buried because they can’t bear to hear what they did. Alex Lifeson didn’t really need to establish his status as a guitar god with Rush, but once they entered the synth era, he thought the album Signals was far from his favourite guitar track to listen to.
For a band that’s made up of only three people, Lifeson seemed to change his sound all the time out of necessity. Being in a prog outfit meant learning many different styles, so it was no use just playing the same shredding leads over every song and hoping for the best whenever the track played out.
That meant thinking like other guitar players, and by the time the 1980s kicked in, Lifeson had traded in his love for Jimmy Page for technicians like Andy Summers. He could still do a fantastic solo when he wanted to, but the focus was to create textures of sounds rather than playing something straight up the middle and grandstanding.
It had never been better when working on Moving Pictures, but Signals marks a moment where the keyboards started to get a little too omnipresent. You can’t blame the Canadian icons for wanting to go along with the flavours of the day, but the amount of aggressive synth textures on the album was enough to leave Flock of Seagulls members dumbfounded.
The album is far from a bad record with iconic tracks like ‘Subdivisions’, but tracks like ‘Countdown’ mark a major turning point for the group’s career, leading to the rest of the decade being flooded with more digitised sounds and Lifeson being pushed further and further away in the background.
In terms of the record’s sounds, Lifeson admitted that it was possibly his fault that everything didn’t work out, telling Guitar World, “Signals was a weird record for me—I liked the songs, but I thought it was a little weak in tonality. Keyboards started coming up a lot more, and so there was a little more of a fight for space with the guitar, which would continue with some of the following records.”
After listening to some of his leads, it’s hard not to wonder if Lifeson and I actually listened to the same record. Sure, there are more times when Geddy Lee is practically married to his keyboard, but are we going to ignore the amazing guitar solo in the middle of ‘Analog Kid’ or the wild whammy bar solo in the middle of ‘Subdivisions’?
If anything, they aren’t as committed to the synths as they would be on later albums, eventually going further into cheesy territory on albums like Power Windows. Then again, when stacked up against the band’s aggressive moments on projects such as Hemispheres, Signals definitely feels like a torch-passing moment between their prog beginnings and their synthesiser period.
