The Rush album that ended an era of prog-rock: “It felt like saying goodbye”
Any rock band aiming for longevity aspires to experience distinct periods in their discography. Every musician desires to transcend mere trendiness, and the ability to evolve with the times distinguishes enduring acts like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin from short-lived sensations. Despite Geddy Lee’s satisfaction in guiding Rush through the pinnacle years of progressive rock, he confessed that Hemispheres felt more like the conclusion of an era rather than the dawn of a new one.
Before Rush even started, progressive rock was already going through its golden age. As Lee and Alex Lifeson were still trying to be the Canadian answer to The Who or Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Yes were already making longer pieces, taking their listeners on a journey rather than having them stick around for a collection of singles.
Once Neil Peart joined the band, Rush finally had a formula that worked, putting some of their most celebrated songs like ‘Anthem’ with tracks that felt like doing advanced calculus while listening to music like ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’. While any logical label thought this would spell disaster, the group’s persistence led to 2112 becoming one of their biggest albums, developing a cult following that has never dwindled since.
Although any artist can only hope to have the freedom Rush had, A Farewell to Kings was a sign that things were about to get really weird. Outside of the strange Renaissance-fair title track, the project veers into different directions on works like ‘Xanadu’, an eleven-minute exercise talking about a man’s voyage through foreign lands and dining on honeydew.
Despite miraculously getting a hit with ‘Closer to the Heart’, Hemispheres did not concern itself with hits. With only four songs, the album feels more like a rock and roll classical piece half the time, featuring the epic first movement on the title track, which is basically everything the band did on the last record amplified by 1000.
But the rock world was changing, and it looked to be taking prog with it. Punk had already taken root, and the sharp edge of the new cutting sound was enough to make these kinds of albums feel a little backwards. New wave was short and poppy, it dedicated itself to the bustle of urban demographics, and it felt akin to a subway train making its way through the night’s sky. Meanwhile, prog felt more like a carriage. It had its beautiful moment, but it felt traditional and old-fashioned; the heavily instrumentalised symphonic musings needed to change.
Even though the band were determined to make the best album they could, they admitted that a lot of their greatest work was insanely hard to pull off. By the time they got to the end of the record, Lee said that there was zero chance that he wanted to make a record like that ever again.
Compared to the other records in their discography, Lee thought that the band were on the verge of becoming too progressive for their own good, telling Louder, “It felt like the end of an era for me. I felt that the side-long songs thing was getting predictable for me as a writer, and I wanted to bust out of that. In a sense, it felt like saying goodbye to that period. I had ideas of where I wanted us to go…I wanted to tell stories, but I didn’t want to be weighed down by themes that had to keep repeating over a twenty-five-minute period.”
The band ditched the macro-structure and moved more keenly toward micro-hooks. The band knew they didn’t have singles to make their way in the music world, and this meant indulgent side-long songs were out. The idea that “pieces” could find their way onto the radio and spread the band’s sound was dead in the water. They needed to be tighter lyrically and shorter in every aspect.
After having to rein in Peart’s ambitious side, the band eventually took their sound into new directions, eventually flirting with the pop charts by making more accessible prog music on songs like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Freewill’. It’s a lot to expect an audience to follow you on epic musical adventures, but something has definitely gone wrong when even they didn’t have the patience for their epic material anymore.
The entire prog-rock world seemed to follow. As Rush led the way so the entire genre took up their blueprint and began following into a new space of radio-friendly sounds and a collection of songs that might even be considered singles.
