The album did Taylor Hawkins called his drumming “bible”
Taylor Hawkins was never a stranger to prog-rock music. He may have been the drummer of one of the biggest bands in mainstream rock at the time, but it wasn’t hard for him to take the building blocks of what he learned from his favourite Rush records and channel them into whatever song he was listening to. However, whereas other people have different definitions of what the word ‘progressive’ is supposed to be, it was a lot simpler for Hawkins to go back to the ones who started it all.
Because looking at any of the prog giants, everyone can deliver a clinic on what to do behind the drum kit. As much as artists like The Beatles could help push rock and roll forward from a production standpoint, it was easy to think of John Bonham as a prog drummer at times, if only for his power to play in complex time signatures while still being one of the strongest people ever to touch a drum kit.
And when looking through the modern bands that Hawkins listened to, it wasn’t like he ever forgot about his progressive roots, either. As much as he loved listening to people like The Police back in the day, all of that passion for drumming went back into listening to bands like the Mars Volta, which practically delivered the musical equivalent of a car crash whenever they worked on albums like Deloused in the Comatorium.
But prog also knew how to create musical movements and make them sound seamless, and that was what Phil Collins was so good at when playing with Genesis, saying, “I have to admit, I’m in a prog phase. I love early Genesis, like Trick Of The Tail and Seconds Out, with Phil Collins, Chester Thompson, and Bill Bruford on drums. Actually, Seconds Out is one of my drum bibles. It’s one of my favourite-sounding drum records too.”
Then again, Collins was always going to have a little asterisk next to his name in terms of the greatest prog drummers of all time. As much as he has been praised for having one of the greatest drum fills ever recorded on the song ‘In the Air Tonight’, he was always put on the side as a songwriter in Genesis. He may have had a hand in making them mainstream, but are we all going to ignore the brilliance of Seconds Out?
There’s a reason why A Trick of the Tail was right next to this album on Hawkins’s list of prog epics, but this is arguably better, knowing what Collins can do in a live setting. Although he does have some help from drumming gods like Chester Thompson and Bill Bruford, Collins’s drumming on the record is a masterclass on its own, whether it’s him going through every piece of ‘Dance on a Volcano’ or managing to make the epic ‘Supper’s Ready’ feel seamless without Peter Gabriel’s lavish costumes.
And it’s not like some of that off-kilter spirit hasn’t rubbed off on Hawkins. As much as he liked to do right by Grohl and play exactly what a Foo Fighters song needed, the odd time signature in a song like ‘Times Like These’ made him feel right at home whenever he played, knowing that he already had done his homework here.
And while there are some great moments sprinkled throughout every one of Genesis’s phases, Seconds Out captures the sound of the band straddling two halves of their career. They were waving goodbye to their theatrical phase, but that didn’t mean they stopped making songs that kept fans on their toes.
