Neil Peart picks the Rush song was a perfect “marriage” of vocals and lyrics
When listening to a band like Rush, it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off of Neil Peart.
Compared to every other rock and roll drummer that ever was, everything seemed so clinically precise whenever he was onstage with them, whether that was working on creating the ultimate drum solo or shoehorning in random time signature changes that somehow managed to sound seamless every single time they were played. But even with all of the drum chops that he had, Peart knew that drumming was only half the battle compared to the lyrics that he wrote for every song.
Depending on your taste for lyrics, though, Peart is either one of the best or the worst lyricists that have ever come along in rock and roll. His lines are far from trite by any means, but if you look at them as pure poetry, there are moments where he can become far too verbose for most people to even understand. He might have been going for something surreal, but who the hell was looking to dine on honeydew and drink the milk of Paradise when sitting through all eleven minutes of ‘Xanadu’?
On the other hand, Peart has his moments where he can break down human emotions better than anyone else. He wasn’t Bob Dylan by any stretch, but when listening to songs like ‘Red Sector A’ or ‘Nobody’s Hero’, it’s enough to stab people in the heart, which isn’t something you normally get out of someone who spends most of their time giving instrument clinics on every single tour.
Among Rush fans, though, Moving Pictures is the perfect middle ground where they hit on a certain magic. They had already spent the past few years making some of the most cerebral music anyone had ever heard, but when people heard tunes like ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’, they actually started to see what the nerds of the world were talking about. The band had some serious songwriting chops behind them, but the best part of the album was actually reserved for the very end.
The whole album feels like a perfect send-off from the more extravagant era of the band’s career, but ‘Vital Signs’ stands as the perfect jumping-off point for the rest of their career. The keyboards had become far more prominent, and the entire backing track feels like something that could have come off a late-era Police record, but Peart felt that the band really knocked it out of the park on the lyrics.
Compared to every other strange detour that they made on previous records, Peart felt that he had a perfect marriage between lyrics and melody, saying, “That’s a song that has a marriage of vocals and lyrics that I’m very happy with. But it took our audience a long time to get it. There was no heavy downbeat; it was all counterpoint between upbeat and downbeat, and there was some reflection of reggae influence and a reflection of the more refined areas of new wave music that we had sort of taken under our umbrella and made happen.”
But that’s part of the genius behind the tune. The whole song is about deviating from the norm, and considering how odd the rest of the song is constructed, the instruments are mimicking what the lyrics mean. For instance, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee practically switch roles for the song, with Lee driving the song with a massive riff, and since there’s no real downbeat, Peart has to rely on keeping the groove just slightly off tempo before bringing everything back down to Earth.
Is it something that’s going to resonate with every single Rush fan? No, but not all Rush songs do on first listen, either. ‘Limelight’ might be a better introduction to what they were all about on the record, but for anyone remotely interested in digging a little deeper, this was the kind of song that paved the way for what the band could do in the future.
