The 1978 Rush song Geddy Lee thought was beyond them: “Really difficult”
There are plenty of difficult tracks in the Rush canon.
The Canadian power trio came to prominence as some of the most talented and ambitious instrumentalists in the world of rock music, bringing punishing power and exacting technical precision to their music. Any casual player who has tried to replicate Alex Lifeson’s opening riff to ‘The Spirit of Radio’ or Neil Peart’s drum solo in ‘Tom Sawyer’ knows that Rush never took the easy way out.
That commitment to complexity was both their greatest strength and their most persistent challenge. As their musicianship evolved, so too did their appetite for pushing boundaries, often leading them into territory where precision and practicality began to clash.
For Rush, this wasn’t a limitation so much as an inevitable byproduct of their creative philosophy. Rather than simplifying their approach, they leaned further into the difficulty, embracing the risk that came with attempting to realise ideas that stretched the very limits of their abilities.
By the end of the 1970s, Rush’s ambitions were starting to hit the ceiling of their skills. All three members were expert players, but their desire to craft incredibly complex work had reached its peak on 1978’s Hemispheres. With just four songs spread across two full sides of vinyl, Rush had reached the point of no return as a progressive unit. For Geddy Lee, one song from the album was a particular sign that they had overreached.
“That was a song where I would have to say our ideas exceeded our ability to play them,” Lee told The Guardian in 2018 about the album’s instrumental closing track, ‘La Villa Strangiato’. “We thought: ‘We’re going to write this long piece and then we’ll just record it live off the floor and boom!’ But it was really difficult.”
Subtitled ‘An Exercise in Self-Indulgence’, ‘La Villa Strangiato’ is a nearly ten-minute workout of styles, themes, time changes, and wild ambition. With no less than twelve separate sections, the song might not have been the longest Rush song ever, but it certainly was one of the most technically difficult. The group spent a number of weeks trying to craft the perfect take but eventually had to record the song in three separate sections.
“It was beyond us. I included it here because it surprised me how popular that song was among our fans,” Lee revealed. “They just love it when we go into that crazy mode. Yes, it is an indulgence, but it seemed to be a pivotal moment for us in creating a fanbase that wanted us to be that way.”
Even though Rush had to record ‘La Villa Strangiato’ piece by piece, the band eventually perfected the song enough to include it in their live shows. In fact, the group would alter the song’s structure and arrangement to allow new variations, as can be heard on live albums like Exit… Stage Left and Rush in Rio. Although ‘La Villa Strangiato’ was indicative of Rush overextending themselves, their execution of the song live proved that they hadn’t truly gone beyond their abilities.
Check out ‘La Villa Strangiato’ down below.
