The Rush album Geddy Lee found most difficult to sing
In any rock band context, the pressure tends to be on the singer to keep up their craft over the years. While most instrumentalists have to worry about the upkeep of their instruments, any vocalist needs to rely on the power of their vocal cords to make the audience go wild, which can get a lot more difficult as time passes. Although Geddy Lee made things work throughout every iteration of Rush, there is one album he doesn’t like to revisit that often.
Before Rush became famous, though, listeners were already paying attention to Lee’s searing delivery. Fitting somewhere between the searing vocals of Robert Plant and a wailing banshee, Lee’s higher register soared above most of the instruments beneath him, giving the group’s prog-rock epics an anchor throughout their tenure.
While fans couldn’t get enough of Lee’s high-pitched squeals, not every critic claimed to be a fan. Throughout the documentary Beyond the Light Stage, the band brought up the various criticisms of Lee’s signature style, being compared to everything from Mickey Mouse on helium to a hamster being shoved out the door with a blowtorch up its ass.
Even though the critics weren’t the best for Lee’s morale, it didn’t stop him from changing his vocal style whenever he could. Throughout every iteration of the band’s existence, Lee’s voice served as the constant in the group, going from the searing sounds of ‘Fly By Night’ to the weathered man on ‘Nobody’s Hero’.
Lee braved through every single album when the band played live, he later admitted that Hemispheres was challenging to perform live. Being the pinnacle of their prog-rock grandiosity, Lee sang at the top of his range throughout the album, including the side-long epic that tells the story of a man travelling through the cosmos after being sucked into a black hole.
Reflecting on the album later, Lee remembers crafting the songs as a singular piece without any thought for the vocals, telling Rolling Stone, “We just assumed that when we got all the tracks down and did the vocals, it would work a treat. When I got to record vocals, which was weeks and weeks later in London at Admission Studios, I came to realise that we’d written the whole album in an awkward key for me. It was very difficult to sing. Singing at that range – even for my goofy voice – was a challenge”.
As Lee braved through the production, the rest of the band didn’t fare much better. Throughout the recording of the massive instrumental ‘La Villa Strangiato’, the trio spent weeks trying to create a bed track before giving up and playing the song in three separate parts.
While Rush continued to play pieces of the album live, they realised that their writing material was beyond their playing capabilities. As they went into the next career phase, the band would focus on writing more straightforward material, crafting complex songs with a pop flair like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’.
Although the band could have quickly lowered the songs’ keys, Lee would never let that slide, stating, “What made it difficult to play huge chunks of it live was the range it was in. And I wouldn’t even dream in those days of transposing it to another key – that would have felt like too big of a compromise”.
