The “intense” Rush song Alex Lifeson struggled to record
There comes a point with a band like Rush where it feels like they can take on anything. Considering how well they were able to transition between different styles like prog, hard rock and synthesised rock throughout their tenure, it wouldn’t come as a shock to many of their fans if, somewhere along the line, they found a way to make mariachi music fit into their catalogue. That kind of musical versatility can’t be taught anywhere, but Alex Lifeson said that making their epic ‘Natural Science’ didn’t come without some hardship.
Then again, it’s strange that Lifeson would single out a piece from Permanent Waves as one of the hardest tracks, considering where the band had been the past few years. This was the same group that had made epics that took up an entire side of a record and had multiple interwoven parts to them, so how would a song standing at a lean nine minutes phase them?
It might seem easier on the surface, but for an outfit like Rush, it’s much harder to make something compact than it is to expand everything. You have a lot of time to shoehorn in every idea you have into a 20-minute epic, but when approaching a song that doesn’t surpass the ten-minute mark, it’s important to be mindful of how long parts go on for.
They had already proven they could do that flawlessly, though. ‘Closer to the Heart’ may be one of the most straight-ahead pop songs from any progressive band, and ‘The Spirit of Radio’ from Permanent Waves is also a good example of the group taking influences from reggae, rock and new wave and turning them into radio fodder.
When talking about ‘Natural Science’, Lifeson pointed to the intensity behind his playing as the main thing that trips him up, telling Ultimate Guitar, “One that comes to mind off the time of my head would be ‘Natural Science’. It’s pretty intense playing, and in the studio we play things a million times before we’re confident that we got the best take. So playing that song a million times was a challenge.”
Looking at the sections that the track goes through, getting all the settings right feels like a guitarist’s nightmare. Since the song changes sections from a fluid style of arpeggiating a la Andy Summers to Eddie Van Halen-level intensity, it’s almost impossible for the whole thing to be taken in when listening to it on the record, let alone having to play the damn thing for hours on end.
That’s before you even get to the rest of the instruments. As Neil Peart has to fly across every single piece of his insane drumkit, Geddy Lee has to perform the equivalent of a circus act by playing bass and keyboards at the same time. God help them if they ever decide to play the song from top to bottom in the studio in one take.
Then again, the band had talked about Permanent Waves being a traditional record for them. They had exhausted themselves trying to make the most progressive music they could on the last album, Hemispheres, so this was their way to compromise their ambitious tendencies with songs that were more streamlined. If the album marks a moment of transition, ‘Natural Science’ was the sound of their progressive edge still hanging on for dear life.
