The 1966 album Neil Peart called “everything I love”
It was nearly impossible trying to find the real Neil Peart underneath all of those drums.
Even though he saved a lot of his personal emotions for his lyrics, there was never any chance that he was going to play along with the same narrative that he was a god among men just because he played the drums really well. He had a lot of stuff to work out in his lyrics, and he felt that he was only doing what he could to make his heroes proud whenever he started quoting his own heart on every record.
But a lot of times Peart knew that he wasn’t going to get too personal in his lyrics, either. The sense of adulation that comes with being a rock and roll star was too alien for him to work on, and he was better off just being a regular guy on the road. After all, the drummer is supposed to be ignored in any other rock band, but Peart just happened to be gifted with the best senses of rhythm in rock and roll history.
So if he did have the chance to show his stuff, he was going to look to some of the best lyricists that he could when searching for inspiration. Ripping off Shakespeare wasn’t exactly a bad start when working on tunes like ‘Limelight’, but some of the greatest tunes that he ever worked on also had a bit of that sardonic wit that you would have found in some of the best albums The Who ever made.
And for Peart, that was all he could have hoped for. Pete Townshend was a genius as far as he could tell, and he wanted to do anything he could to get as close to his genius as possible. He didn’t feel like he needed to play like Keith Moon by any stretch, but there was something about the way that Townshend wove together his stories that seemed a bit more novel than the average prog rock epic.
Everyone would have fawned over an album like Tommy, but The Who Sell Out was when Peart truly fell in love. He couldn’t get enough of the more cynical take on the consumerism aspect of the music, and hearing them take the piss out of rock and roll while also making songs better than anyone else was the kind of thing that he lived for any time he worked on one of Rush’s projects.
That kind of honesty in song is what anyone can hope for, and Peart wouldn’t trade the album for the world, saying, “Recently I went back and listened to The Who Sell Out, after something like thirty years, and everything about that record reminded me how I used to love music – from the inside out, every note, every beat, every word, every sound. Beyond the melodies and rhythms, the actual sonic textures of the music had an effect on me that was transcendent – sensory, emotional, cerebral, physical. While I listened, it was the whole universe to me.”
Admittedly, Rush’s music didn’t always have the same kind of humour that Townshend did, but Peart could still echo the same sentiments as well. He wasn’t going to have a problem with working on a song like ‘The Spirit of Radio’, per se, but the lyrics talking about honesty in art is practically him rephrasing what Townshend was getting at when he first started to question what the music industry was all about.
So while the business side of the industry could be a little bit daunting for someone like Peart, he knew that he was safe knowing that there were people like Townshend out there. No one would have thought that brand of songwriting would have worked, but it turns out that if you’re honest, you can go a lot further than just trying to sell a different kind of tune to your audience.
