The first Rush album that Neil Peart enjoyed listening to
There are no set rules that say that Neil Peart had to enjoy every single thing that Rush played.
It’s one thing for the rest of the critical world to absolutely loathe the Canadian icons back in the day, but they were more than happy to keep trucking and let the fans decide what their music was worth. And while they eventually rose to become one of the greatest cult bands that the world has ever known, Peart did have to take a while before he actually could bear to listen to one of their albums in full.
Then again, it’s hard for any artist to divorce themselves from the creative process once they start making their masterpieces. Even though a band like Metallica may have created their own classics that have gone down in history, it’s easy for them to look back and think about the hours that it took to get their sound on tape rather than worry about whether a song like ‘Enter Sandman’ is getting played on the radio.
Since Rush was never a radio-focused act, it was easy for them to simply love playing their tunes live. 2112 is what earned the band their freedom as artists, but with that much wiggle room to work with, the band were bound to go completely nutty when they found out they could put anything on record and know that the fans would eat it up. But it’s not like every one of them wasn’t a massive exercise as well.
Records like A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres are both fantastic in their own right, but the idea of expecting everyone to listen to a 20-minute opus on one entire side of the record would have been a tough ask back in the day. And it didn’t help when a lot of the songs had a fantastical element that most people would either find incredibly pretentious or cringy if it was made today.
Oh, you thought Zeppelin had one too many Tolkien references? Well, you’re not going to like ‘The Necromancer’, where Peart practically reimagines a Middle Earth scenario where the band goes up against Sauron, or even the song ‘Xanadu’ where they spend over 11 minutes talking about this long journey with such fanciful language about dining on honeydew and drinking the milk of paradise.
So when albums like Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures came out, Peart was relieved that they had an album that hit the charts that he could actually be proud of, saying, “It’s about nineteen-eighty that I really start to like our music like a fan. Before that there’s stuff I like in an affectionate way, because we were brave, but as far as achievement I really think we started to bring it together a bit with Permanent Waves…, but particularly Moving Pictures and from then on.”
The longer songs hadn’t gone anywhere, but getting their material more streamlined worked out a lot better in the long run. Most of their songs had started to become a bit too self-indulgent, and when they finally started to make waves on the charts with tracks like ‘Freewill’, they realised that they didn’t have to spend over ten minutes trying to tell a story when they could make their point in four or five minutes.
While the material did get any less challenging to play, it was much better to have records that didn’t sound like exercises for Peart. Although it’s a shame that we were never going to get a song as extravagant as ‘La Villa Strangiato’, Rush did manage to do the one thing that most of the greatest artists forget to do: learn from their older material.
