The Rush solos Alex Lifeson called his “best work”
Anyone looking to improve their chops on any instrument can afford to take a few cues from Rush. Throughout their time in the spotlight, the prog rock legends were known to take their audience through sonic twists and turns at every opportunity, with every single musician creating phenomenal parts that became musical hooks through sheer force of will. While Alex Lifeson was already a monster player when the band made their first album, he considered one of their deep cuts among his best guitar playing.
When looking at where the band started, though, Lifeson was a much different player when working on their debut. Creating songs in the realm of the blues rock of the late 1960s, much of Lifeson’s playing on the first record is still indebted to guitarists like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, often stretching his solos out into elongated jams like on ‘Working Man’.
By the time Neil Peart entered the fold on the drums, the band had turned into a completely different animal. Becoming more fascinated by the guitar work of artists like Steve Hackett and Steve Howe, Lifeson would incorporate more eclectic influences into his sound, crafting guitar passages that had the same fury with more complex sonic textures on tracks like ‘By-Tor and The Snow Dog’.
Despite being a part of a progressive rock institution, Lifeson always held onto the rock and roll spirit that hooked him when he was a kid. Even through the band’s creative detours working with synthesisers in the early 1980s, Lifeson would still find time to shred his guitar, performing some of the most daunting guitar passages this side of Eddie Van Halen on tracks like ‘The Analog Kid’.
By the time they had started weaving jazzy textures into their sound on tracks like Hold Your Fire, it was becoming clear that they needed a slight change of direction. Working on the next album, Roll the Bones, the band would have a more balanced approach to their instrumentation, with Lifeson’s guitars having an equal footing with Geddy Lee’s various keyboard lines.
While the title track featured a few missteps by including a rap verse for the only time on a Rush project, ‘Bravado’ would be the clear highlight for Lifeson. Lifeson would consider the song one of the greatest pieces of work he ever made, featuring some of the most complex chord patterns and an off-the-wall solo.
When talking about the track, Lifeson ranked it as well as ‘Ghost of a Chance’ among his finest performances, saying, “That’s a special song for me, that’s one of the songs that we lifted some of the guitar parts off the demo tapes we used on the finished record. The solo is a thrown-away solo that was just a one-take solo. ‘Bravado’ and ‘Ghost Of A Chance’, those two solos I feel are probably among the best that I’ve done — the most emotive and the most spontaneous”.
For as many keyboards that were still cluttering up the mix, Lifeson would come back with a vengeance a few albums later as well, putting together the best guitar tones of his career on albums like Counterparts and continuing to innovate up until their final album, Clockwork Angels. Lifeson may have had his signature sound as far back as the mid-1970s, but the fact that he considered these deep cuts among his best work is proof that he is constantly innovating his sound.
