The Rush song based on the dreams of Alex Lifeson
For a band like Rush, inspiration can come from anywhere. Early in the trio’s career, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were shadowing some of their earliest inspiration, including Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Blue Cheer. By the time Neil Peart came on board, Rush had begun their transition into progressive rock, complete with fantastical sci-fi lyrics from Peart. It wasn’t just dystopian futures and Ayn Rand, however: autobiographical tales of leaving home, joke songs about going bald, and odes to cannabis were all subjects of classic Rush material.
The band could tap into anything, whether it be as elaborate as a voyage through a black hole or as simple as the identifier code of the Toronto International Airport. It all got filtered through Rush’s intricate compositions, the likes of which were growing more extreme and unwieldy as the band approached the 1980s. 1978’s Hemispheres, despite only containing four songs, contains the most technically complex material the band ever put on record. It all comes to a roaring conclusion with ‘La Villa Strangiato’, a nine-minute instrumental tellingly subtitled ‘An Exercise in Self-Indulgence’.
“It was so complicated, and went through so many different mood and time signature changes, [that] it would have needed to have been charted out in order to keep track of where you were at any given point,” Rush producer Terry Brown observed in the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. Although they were able to perform the song live after completing it, the initial attempts to record ‘La Villa Strangiato’ in one take became impossible.
“I think we spent eleven days trying to record the bed track only, and finally, we had to admit defeat. We had to do it in three parts,” Lee revealed. “We had written material that was really a bit beyond us, considering our level of musicianship at the time, and that was the thing about Rush: we’re always overreaching.”
Despite being on the shortlist for Rush’s most intricate song, ‘La Villa Strangiato’ actually came from a relatively benign place – Alex Lifeson’s dreams. “This is Alex’s brain, and every section of that song is different dreams that Alex would tell us about and we’d be, ‘stop, stop.’ It was these bizarre dreams that he would insist on telling you every detail about, so it became a joke between Geddy and me,” Peart told CBC Music in 2014.
“‘La Villa Strangiato’ means strange city, and there was so much going on in that,” Peart added. “There’s also a big band section in there, which was absolutely for me because I always wanted to play that approach. And cartoon music. We got in trouble later because we used music from a cartoon from the 1930s.”
Because Rush fans are a determined bunch, we know that the ‘Monsters!’ section is actually an adaptation of the song ‘Powerhouse’ from composer Raymond Scott. Famously used in cartoons dating back to the 1930s, ‘Powerhouse’ has also been featured in modern-day animated shows like The Simpsons, SpongeBob Squarepants, and The Ren and Stimpy Show. Evidently, Lifeson had been watching some cartoons before drifting off to sleep.
Check out ‘La Villa Strangiato’ down below.
