The Rush album Geddy Lee thought was overdone: “I realised we had over-cooked it”
Every great rock and roll record can sometimes fall victim to being cast into overproduction. Regardless of how much time someone spends sculpting the perfect tune out of nothing, there’s a tight balancing act that comes with creating an album that still has some teeth instead of being polished to a fine sheen when someone listens to it. Although Rush didn’t have to worry about putting the muscle behind their tracks, Geddy Lee thought that Vapor Trails could have benefited from being tweaked just a touch.
Then again, the thought of Rush making an album after the 2000s was slim to none. Neil Peart had been the resident mastermind behind their lyrics and rhythms for years, and now that he had lost both his wife and daughter within the span of a year, he was seriously starting to question whether he had it in him to return to his throne.
The clock ticked by for years, but Peart eventually found his path back on Vapor Trails. And judging by the lyrics that he put together, he still had a lot to unpack, considering that many of the best lines come from him rehashing all the pain of those few years to help soothe his soul in some way.
That’s on the lyrical front, but why does the actual version sound like trash? Despite being one of the greatest ‘phoenix from the ashes’ stories in rock history, Vapor Trails was a major victim of the loudness wars, which meant that every instrument was thrown into the red on the mixing board without caring about clipping.
So that means while the performances are great on tunes like ‘One Little Victory’, the idea of sitting through an entire record of that production is enough to give people secondhand migraines. Lee can assault his bass all he wants, but when it sounds like it’s burrowing into your skull, that’s when it starts to get a bit dicey.
But it’s not like Lee didn’t figure out the problems with the record over time, eventually telling Rolling Stone, “Everybody went their own way. I took the record to New York to master it. By the time I had a couple of weeks off to hear it clearly, I realized we had kind of over-cooked the record. The mixes were really loud and brash. The mastering job was harsh and distorted, but by then, it was out of my hands. It was already out.”
When the remix finally came out in 2013, though, people finally got the chance to hear the album as it originally sounded. And without the fear of someone shoving a clothes hangar into your ear, this actually might be the best album that Rush ever made during their final decade as a group.
It’s not necessarily full of the prog-rock adventures of their early years, but it didn’t necessarily have to be. This was the sound of a band finally gelling together after a long time away, and from the minute ‘One Little Victory’, they sounded so happy to be playing off each other once again.
