The Rush album that Alex Lifeson wasn’t happy with
There was never a genre that didn’t seem to suit Rush. Throughout their time as one of the premiere acts of the 1970s, the Canadian power trio worked their way through any style they could get their hands on, whether that was the Renaissance-fair-sounding ‘A Farewell to Kings’ or the sci-fi epic going on in the midst of 2112. Even though the band could stretch their songs as long as they wanted, the next decade needed a switch up.
While the band had been flirting with using keyboards now and again in their previous efforts, it began to come to a head in the 1980s, having just as much time in the mix as Alex Lifeson’s guitar on Moving Pictures. Though fans were still on board for a majority of the time, the next few years would see Rush dipping into their most electronic fair to date.
When talking about his approach to songwriting, Geddy Lee remembered being excited by the idea of adding keyboards, telling Beyond the Light Stage, “My need to write melodies is more satisfied on a keyboard. As a songwriter, you’re always looking for a different angle to give you something fresh”.
Although the first few albums had garnered massive songs for the band, like ‘Subdivisions’ and ‘Distant Early Warning’, Lifeson started to feel the wheels falling off when working on the album Power Windows. Easily the band’s most electronic to date, Lifeson found it hard to make his voice heard in the studio, with his guitars getting drowned out by different glitchy soundscapes.
This would lead to tension in the studio, with Lifeson saying, “With Power Windows, I found it really difficult to work around the way the keyboards were developing. Why am I looking for a different place? I shouldn’t be looking for a different place. What’s going on with these keyboards? I mean, it’s not even a real instrument”.
Even though Lifeson had a hard time making his voice heard, Lee considered Power Windows to be an essential record in the group’s development, explaining, “Alex and I had some real disagreements about how the keyboard should be, but Power Windows is a really important record, because it was the final and essential blending of keyboards and guitar to me”.
Little did Lifeson realise this wouldn’t be the last electronic-leaning progressive rock. On the following album, Hold Your Fire, the band went even deeper into fusing electronic and organic instrumentation, which made for one of their poppiest songs to date on the track ‘Time Stand Still’.
By the time the band got around to making their later records like Presto and Roll the Bones, Lee remembers Lifeson not wanting to compromise anymore, saying, “Alex was very [slams fist] ‘Let’s have a concept, let’s not have keyboards,’ and I went along with it. I was a little bit sad. There were a lot of battles because the engineers want Alex to play without his pedals and his own synthesisers”.
While it would take a few more records before the band got the synthesised elements out of their system, the album Vapor Trails arrived to finally put the keyboards to rest. Rush can adapt to any genre that they are interested in, but towards the end of the ‘80s, they may have overindulged themselves a little too much.
