The 1978 album that broke Rush, according to Geddy Lee
For as complicated as progressive rock can seem, Rush can often be a little too intense for the average fan.
Although Pink Floyd and Yes may have shown the world what can be done with different time signatures and long episodic songs, the Canadian power trio spent most of the 1970s delivering a clinic in complicated songs, often playing up every strength they had as players.
While their cult audience ate up every album they made, it was a matter of time before the wheels began to fall off.
After drummer and lyricist Neil Peart joined the band, Rush became a well-oiled rock machine, creating one massive conceptual masterpiece after another, starting with Fly By Night. Although their first offerings produced little to no record sales, 2112 was when everything turned around. Being a concept album about the freedom of expression, fans began congregating towards the group’s against-the-man appeal, relating to the story of a man wanting to play music against the wishes of high priests.
Looking to capitalise on their momentum, A Farewell to Kings began as an expansion on their ambitious side. Featuring the ten-minute closer ‘Cygnus X1’, the song told a harrowing story about a man’s journey into a black hole and having his atoms pulled apart. While the concept may have been tough to digest, it would be nothing compared to their next record.
At only four tracks, Hemispheres was the culmination of everything Rush had been building towards, featuring one side-long epic expanding on the tale in ‘Cygnus X1’. Though the shorter songs on the second side may have been completed faster, they also brought their fair share of challenges.
When talking about laying down the track for the instrumental ‘La Villa Strangiato’, Lee remembered having to break it up, telling Beyond the Lighted Stage, “Even the shorter songs on that record like ‘La Villa Strangiato’ were really hard, and we were determined to get [the song] done in one take. We spent days trying to get the bed track, and then we had to admit defeat. We had to do it in three parts.”
Once the band started to go on the road, they realised just how high a bar they had set for themselves. After getting the song done in three separate parts, Rush made it a habit of playing ‘La Villa Strangiato’ live, pushing themselves to the brink of musicianship trying to get every note perfect.
Looking back on the record, Lee thought that Hemispheres marked the end of the line for them, saying, “Hemispheres was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of long songs. The intensity of Hemispheres made us want to run away from that kind of record. So we ran away from Hemispheres straight into ‘Spirit of Radio’.”
Serving as the opening song on their next album, Permanent Waves, ‘Radio’ was the band’s first time incorporating elements like reggae into their sound, which broadened their appeal to pop fans. On subsequent albums like Moving Pictures, the band would continue to toy with pop aesthetics, managing to get massive hits on rock radio like ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’. Although Rush could still play circles around any other prog band, they quickly learned it was more about what was being said in the song than impressing their fellow musicians.
In many ways, Hemispheres represented both the peak and the breaking point of Rush’s progressive ambitions. The album proved that the trio could execute impossibly intricate arrangements with frightening precision, but it also exposed the creative exhaustion that came with constantly trying to outdo themselves.
There are only so many times a band can attempt to make the next ‘2112’ before the process starts becoming more punishing than inspiring.
That shift toward accessibility never meant Rush abandoned their intelligence or musicianship, either. Instead, albums like Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures showed the band learning how to condense those sprawling ideas into tighter, more emotionally immediate songs.
Tracks like ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’ still contained the technical brilliance fans expected, but they also carried hooks and relatable themes that allowed Rush to evolve from cult prog heroes into one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
