The one Rush album Geddy Lee couldn’t stand singing: “The worst two weeks of my life”
Even for the most diehard Rush fans, listening to Geddy Lee sing for more than an hour at a time can be a bit of a challenge.
He was a fantastic vocalist across every era of their career, but when listening to the way that he sang back in the day, it always fit somewhere between the howling of Robert Plant and the sound of a musical demon, depending on who you talked to. It was always going to be a bit of an acquired taste, but even the Canadian icons knew they had gone too far when Lee started to get tired of the sound of his own voice.
But Lee’s singing has always been a key strength of the band’s music. Yes, he might push it to 11 on a lot of their greatest works from the 1970s, but when he settled into his middle register in the 1980s, there was a lot more room for him to explore the different textures of his voice. Moving Pictures is his finest showing for blending both sides of his voice, and even when they delved into the world of electronic music and keyboards, hearing him sing on ‘Mystic Rhythms’ and ‘Time Stand Still’ are the closest that the band ever came to writing straight pop songs.
Then again, that’s not exactly what you’d expect from a band that got their foot in the door by making some of the most complex music known to man. Their biggest song for a while was a piece that spanned an entire side of a record, talking about space federations and the loss of individuality, so it’s not like they were trying to get on the same charts that the Captain and Tenille were or anything.
And once they got the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, they weren’t going to stop pushing themselves to the brink in the studio. 2112 may have been the foundation for the rest of their career, but A Farewell to Kings was even weirder in many respects, featuring fantastical songs like ‘Xanadu’ and Lee reaching up into the stratosphere when it came time to hit those final notes of ‘Cygnus X1’. But since that song doesn’t have a proper ending, they were going to pull out all the stops for Hemispheres.
From the moment it started, their next record was one of the most complex things any prog rock band had ever attempted, but it’s also more than a little bit silly. They did end up crawling up their own ass a little bit when playing tunes like ‘La Villa Strangiato’, but when it came time to do the vocals in one pass, Lee thought that they had drastically overdone everything.
The songs were still impressive, but being able to sing in that high register were some of the most difficult moments Lee ever had in the studio, saying, “It was just the worst two weeks of my life recording vocals. I said, ‘Look, in a way we are becoming formulaic, just like all these bands that we can’t stand. We do the overture thing, and then we do this theme and that theme. So we said, ‘What if we take six minutes and try to do something that’s more tuneful but is still fucked up, with really complicated musical moments that have a different energy?’”
So when Permanent Waves came out, it was like the band finally learned how to combine both sides of their sound. Listening to bands like Ultravox and The Police certainly helped, but a track like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ was like a direct retort to what Hemispheres was all about. They could still play around with different time signatures, but rarely has any band managed to make a song that transitioned between different styles so beautifully while still keeping everything catchy as hell.
Lee’s voice may have still been in fine form, but walking away from Hemispheres was about more than stretching their muscles past the prog-rock sphere. Because if they had continued down that road, there’s a good chance that Lee would have lost his voice right as they were about to reach their pinnacle.
