The 2012 album Geddy Lee called his greatest work: “Our strongest”
Nothing that Geddy Lee ever wrote with Rush was meant to be necessarily easy to play.
They were born in the era when prog rock was one of the biggest genres in the world, and while King Crimson and Pink Floyd laid the groundwork for what the genre was supposed to be, the Canadian icons were willing to make the kind of records that would have made Yes and Genesis wonder what the hell they were even thinking. But even after making the most extravagant rock and roll songs of all time, Lee felt that there was a lot more ground to cover every time they went into the studio.
It’s hard to believe that one band was able to make such complex music, but you have to remember the kind of fanbase Rush has. Rush fans are some of the most devout fans of all time, and as a card-carrying member, there’s a good chance that Deadheads only wish they could hold a candle to the devotion that everyone has to their favourite band’s music whenever they play a show.
There wasn’t a soul who was leaving until the show was over, whenever they played tunes like ‘Tom Sawyer’, and while their records did take a few twists and turns once in a while, every fan was along for the ride. Admittedly, some people may have been turned off when they decided to make songs that were dominated by keyboards, but even during their synth era, records like Grace Under Pressure and Hold Your Fire are absolute masterpieces for people not allergic to a Casio keyboard.
But somewhere along the line, Rush turned into a more progressive style of dad rock band. Counterparts and Test For Echo are brilliant records for what they are, but compared to the heights of Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, they weren’t going to light up the charts like they used to. They needed that fourth member to get them to the next level, and after Vapor Trails brought them back together, Nick Raskulinecz was the perfect guy for the job.
He lived and breathed all things Rush when he was a kid, and Snakes and Arrows was the first time that the old version of the band came back out again. ‘Far Cry’ is still one of the greatest love letters to their classic style of writing, and by the time that they had taken their final bows on Clockwork Angels, Lee felt that they had taken their sound about as far as it could possibly go as a three-piece.
While the recency bias may have affected Lee’s decision, he felt that there still wasn’t another Rush album that captured the same aesthetic as they did on their final work, saying, “I think I would have to choose the last record we did, Clockwork Angels. Every artist says their favourite record is their most recent, but there’s something about that record that seemed to be the maturation and accumulation of all the different versions of Rush that we’ve been. I think our songwriting is our strongest and our playing is our most confident.”
And for a band that had been in the prog rock game for as long as they had, the fact that they closed things out on a proper concept album almost seemed like the best scenario. There had been plenty of times where they had conceptual songs that took up an entire side of a record, but having an entire album play out like some strange steampunk epic, complete with an accompanying novel by Neil Peart, was them pulling out all of the stops more than ever before on a project.
Given how long they had been in the game as well, hearing songs like ‘Caravan’ and ‘Headlong Flight’ this far into their career was a testament to how far they had come as players. They were ready to turn it in by this point, and even if Lee didn’t necessarily ever want to stop, he was content knowing that he and his friends had delivered one of the finest records that they had ever worked on.
