The Rush songs Rush grew to hate
Rush is an incredibly difficult band to define. In fact, one of the only things that remains consistent about the band is an element of inconsistency. This inconsistency complements the band in the best possible way, as it results from complete creative freedom and fearlessness when tackling different ideas.
That willingness to shift direction so frequently is what ultimately defined Rush’s identity. Rather than settling into a single sound that guaranteed commercial success, they treated each album as an opportunity to explore something new, even if it risked alienating sections of their audience. It’s a rare approach for a band operating at their level, but it allowed them to evolve organically instead of becoming a product of their own formula.
Of course, that same freedom also meant that not every experiment landed the way they intended. When a band constantly pushes its own boundaries, missteps are inevitable, and Rush were never immune to that reality. What sets them apart, however, is their willingness to acknowledge those moments, viewing them as part of the creative process rather than something to shy away from.
The result is that when you flick through Rush’s discography, you’re privy to a range of great tracks that vary from elongated prog rock ballads to short and sweet radio-friendly rock songs. It’s not just the instrumentation that changes throughout their discography, either, but the themes they write about, as the topics of various songs are also inclined to change drastically, from pleas to loved ones to mountain fables.
As is always the case when a band have a varied discography, though, the opinions between members on what works and what doesn’t are likely to clash. Rush is no exception to this, as while they are generally fans of all the work they’ve put out, there are some tracks which don’t work, and they would rather have never been put out into the world.
Here, we will look at Neil Peart, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee and discuss the Rush songs they deemed their least favourite.
The Rush songs that members of Rush hated:
Neil Peart – ‘Cold Fire’
Rush has become known as a band capable of taking on various challenges when writing music. Regardless of time signature or complexity, the band members are up to the challenge and generally come away with something tremendous. However, while technical proficiency is available in spades, Peart struggled to write about specific topics as he found them cliché and unnecessary. This is what he struggled with when putting together ‘Cold Fire’.
“In ‘Cold Fire’ I have the woman speaking to the man, and she’s smarter than he is,” said Peart when discussing the setting for the conversational track, “It was a difficult technical challenge lyrically, but those are the kind of things that now, after all these years, you start to feel you have the craft to take on […] I don’t mind writing about love now, where I would have avoided that in the previous years just because of the inability to get beyond cliches.”
Alex Lifeson – ‘Panacea’ and ‘Tai Shan’
Alex Lifeson felt that a couple of Rush songs had left something to the imagination. The first was ‘Tai Shan’, a track that isn’t lacking in ambition but does fall short of the mark as far as execution is concerned. The song is about a holy mountain in China, which Neil Peart wrote while sitting on said mountain. It’s a nice idea, but Lifeson wasn’t keen, “’Tai Shan’ is one of the worst, easily,” he said.
Also, given how much of a perfectionist the members of Rush are, they have always hesitated to release a song that feels like it falls short of the mark. This is exactly how Lifeson felt about ‘Panacea’, a song he liked in theory but didn’t feel like it made it out of the draft stage. “It was an attempt at something that didn’t really work out,” he said, “It was innocent.”
Geddy Lee – ‘Tai Shan’
It seems that Lifeson wasn’t the only band member who wasn’t a fan of the track ‘Tai Shan’, as Geddy Lee also named it one of his least favourite Rush songs. The ambition of the track was too much, to the point that while he likes the song, he also thinks it becomes impossible for people to relate to it.
“It was such a personal for Neil [Peart],” he said, “And it was such a great moment for me, Alex and I had a hard time putting ourselves in it.” Lee also confessed that there were slightly more mischievous factors at play as well, “Guys in bands really need all the ammunition we can get to make fun of each other. It just sort of landed on ‘Tai-Shan’.”
