The one Rush song Neil Peart didn’t want to be remembered for
Anyone even remotely interested in Rush was going to have to do their homework to analyse their lyrics.
Their first record may have been pretty by-the-numbers rock and roll songs, but as soon as Neil Peart got to work on the lyrics, we were about to be treated to some of the most cerebral lyrics to ever been thrown in the middle of a prog-rock song And while a lot of what Peart wrote was incredibly sophisticated for its time, it’s not like every one of his tunes were supposed to be taken seriously.
Just look at the way that he approached writing 2112. The actual title song is among one of the finest progressive tracks of all time and tells a brilliant story from beginning to an end, but it’s hard to imagine that the same band managed to write a song like ‘Passage to Bangkok’ all about the wonders of smoking weed during their time on tour.
For all they knew, this was going to be their last album before their label dropped, so they might as well have gone out while having fun. But when the public finally latched onto them and turned them into one of the biggest names in progressive rock over the next few months, they were given that creative golden ticket. No label meetings. No songwriting help. All they had to do was make the music they wanted, and while that would be fun, it can also be dangerous.
Because if you look at the kind of lyrics Peart would be writing, it sounds like he was high as hell when writing a few of them. ‘Closer to the Heart’ did give them a firm basis for a lead single, and yet that appears on the same album where they talk about dining on honeydew and drinking the milk of Paradise on the other side of the record. But if they managed to get away with something as nutty as that, Hemispheres is what happens when they crawl all the way up their own ass.
Before people start rioting, though, Hemispheres is one of those rare self-indulgent albums that actually manages to sound good, all things considered. The epic piece of the first side is among the finest displays that they ever pulled off together, and ‘La Villa Strangiato’ is the kind of tune that feels impossible to nail, but when looking at the short songs, Peart did have a few hangups listening back to tunes like ‘The Trees’.
The song itself is a slightly more whimsical tune for them, but Peart felt that it wasn’t exactly the first song he’d want to show a potential Rush fan, saying, “Lyrically, that’s a piece of doggerel. I certainly wouldn’t be proud of the writing skill of that. What I would be proud of in that is taking a pure idea and creating an image for it. I was very proud of what I achieved in that sense. Although on the skill side of it, it’s zero. I wrote ‘Trees’ in about five minutes.”
If Peart is to be believed, though, it’s pretty amazing to have this kind of allegory put together in a few minutes. While the kind of oligarchy theme that he puts together in the lyrics is more than a little bit questionable, the fact that Peart felt the need to retract a lot of the beliefs that he felt at the time showed that he at least managed to grow up a little bit when he eventually started writing albums like Vapor Trails.
The rest of the song is still the band in their prime, but it’s best to put on one of their more epic cuts if you want to get a better sense of what Peart’s lyrics are about. He was a natural poet in many senses, but even the best wordsmiths in the word have their fair share of moments where they are a bit too flowery with their language.
