The “autobiographical” song Geddy Lee told the story of Rush
Any band that’s been around for decades will always come across those moments, wondering if they have anything else to say.
There are only so many places people can go when writing a rock and roll song, but when thinking about the biggest names in music, no one wants to hear about the struggles they are having living in a posh mansion or complaining about the nonstop grind of being on the road. But Rush were never that kind of band, and towards the very end of their career, Geddy Lee felt comfortable knowing that they put the final bow on one of the greatest prog bands of all time.
Looking at where the band had been leading up to their final album and tour, though, it was clear that they had to step back in some way. Alex Lifeson had already been dealing with his own struggles with arthritis, and while Neil Peart was always in top form whenever he played, there’s only so many times you can ask someone to play superhuman drum fills for hours on end before their body starts to give out on them.
On first listen to Clockwork Angels, though, you would have sworn they had never missed a beat. The fact that they waited until the very end to do a fully-fledged concept album may have been a missed opportunity, but Peart’s steam-punk vision for their final hurrah was one of the greatest opportunities they had to show fans what they could do, and from the opening strains of ‘Caravan’, everyone knows they are in for a ride.
Although the album does have the modern Rush trappings of sounding a bit too gargantuan from a mixing perspective, the one exception is ‘Headlong Flight’. No one was expecting Lee to be reaching for the same high notes he did back in the Hemispheres era, but with his weathered voice, this song feels like a victory lap for all of those years that they had put into becoming the biggest prog band in the world.
Even when commenting about the song, Lee had to admit that a lot of it felt like the story of Rush being told by Peart, saying, “There’s something about Headlong Flight that’s almost about the history of my band to me. It’s autobiographical in a way. Forty years into this career, and it goes by like that. The sentiment in that song is ‘I wish I could do it all again,’ and it’s true.” And for anyone who knew the schedule Rush had, it’s not like any of them had regrets about their time on the road.
This was a group that practically lived onstage, and while they couldn’t always reproduce all of their fancy overdubs in front of a live audience, what they managed to do felt superhuman. Outside of nailing some of the hardest prog sections that anyone had conceived of, having Lee operate not only the bass guitar but the keyboards, vocal duties, and synth pads with his feet was crossing the line between being a musician and a full-on circus performer.
But the reason why they kept it going was because of their undying love for the fans. They were never mainstream in the same way that a band like Pink Floyd was in their prime, but listening to their best work, it was always about making something pure without having to chase trends. They did have periods that people may have cringed at, but that’s all a part of what made them interesting to so many people.
So, really, ‘Headlong Flight’ isn’t just a commemoration of the journey it took to get the band to their place in history. It was a thank-you to the fans that turned them into one of the most popular cult rock bands ever. They didn’t have the same immediate hooks as the rest of their prog rock brethren, but sometimes a band can be rewarded by simply being some of the greatest musicians on Earth.
