What a Rush
Canadian supergroup enjoys a fruitful time.
alex lifeson “I think all of us would agree that we are at a stage where we’re playing, we feel, the best we’ve ever played.”
An Evening With Rush — Clockwork Angels Tour When: Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Where: Rexall Place Tickets: $35 to $140 plus service charges at Ticketmaster.ca
Rush has been around for almost 45 years, but the past 10 — leading to the release of its new album, Clockwork Angels — have been a particularly fruitful one for the Canadian rock trio.
Back in 2002 Rush had a new album, Vapor Trails, but was focused on its return from a five-year hiatus that had followed the tragic deaths of drummer/lyricist Neil Peart’s wife and daughter only 10 months apart. The group was on tenterhooks, unsure if the comeback would take, if their fans would still be there, if their particular brand of musical magic was still intact.
Those concerns quickly became moot, however, and the ensuing decade arguably has been the most successful in Rush’s history. The group has released three Top 5 studio albums and an EP, with Clockwork Angels giving Rush its highest debut placement on the Billboard 200 since Counterparts (1993). A string of successful tours resulted in four live album/DVD releases, and in 2010 Rush was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage.
“It has been a very fruitful time, and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind,” says 58-year-old guitarist Alex Lifeson, who formed the group in 1968 with singer/bassist/keyboardist Geddy Lee, speaking by telephone from his Toronto home. “We’ve been doing so much touring and three albums of new material, so it’s been quite an interesting period — particularly the last few years, with the documentary coming out and the broadening of our audience. It’s really been quite a ride these past few years.
“I think all of us would agree that we are at a stage where we’re playing, we feel, the best we’ve ever played,” Lifeson adds. “There’s a relaxed confidence that we’re feeling in playing live and in all the work we do. It’s nice to be able to do that on your 20th album and when you’re approaching 60 years old.”
Clockwork Angels is a unique project for Rush, the longest-gestating album the group has ever made. According to Peart, who joined the band in 1974, discussions began at a dinner in December 2009, when he presented Lifeson and Lee with the idea for a concept album based on a story he had worked up with a friend, science-fiction author Kevin J. Anderson. The theme was “a young man’s quest to follow his dreams” in a hostile world, and by January 2010 the Californiabased Peart had sent a batch of lyric ideas to Toronto to let his bandmates start working on the music.
“We understood what the gist of the story was,” Lifeson says, “and of course it evolved over a couple of years. We understood that it was a story about a journey and, with that singular thought in mind, that’s kind of how we approached the music. We wanted to make it quite cinematic and get a sense of going to these places and feeling these moods as the journey continues.”
Anderson and Peart are also collaborating on a Clockwork Angels novel.
Conceptual pieces are hardly new to Rush, whose past albums have included lengthy suites such as 2112 (1976) and Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres (1978).
“You know, all our records are thematic,” Lifeson says. “Maybe not as overt as Clockwork Angels, but all our records have a connection and fluidity that runs through them. But this one is a little more overt, and there’s a little more of a story to it, and I think it gave Neil an opportunity to express himself on a wider platform.”
Rush started recording Clockwork Angels in April 2010 at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, working again with Nick Raskulinecz, their co-producer on their previous album, Snakes & Arrows (2007). The initial sessions live with (the material) for a little bit,” the guitarist continues, “and we came in with a different vibe and a different attitude at each stage of the process. That really made writing this record an absolute joy. We were positive through the whole experience. It never got bogged down. It was a lot of work, and I think we all made a great effort to make it the best album we could, but at the same time we were just having so much fun.” yielded a pair of songs, Caravan and BU2B, that Rush released online and played during its Time Machine tour of 2010 and 2011. Sessions for the album resumed in Toronto in late 2010.
“It was very different for us,” Lifeson says. “Usually, when we commit to a record, that’s all we’re focused on, and we kind of dive into it and … do … it all at once. So to break it up like this was something very different and new for us. “But it was nice because we could
One thing Rush didn’t spend time on, the guitarist adds, was trying to make the music commercial — or appealing to radio, which has embraced the group only occasionally through the years, making hits of songs such as Closer to the Heart (1977), Spirit of Radio (1980), Tom Sawyer (1981) and Limelight (1981) while ignoring much of the band’s output.
“We never think about radio or if something is commercially accessible,” Lifeson says. “We’ve never done that, and this album was definitely no exception.”
In fact Headlong Flight, the first single from Clockwork Angels, is a radio-unfriendly piece that clocks in at an imposing 7-1/2 minutes.
“Our expectation was that they probably wouldn’t play it,” Lifeson says, “and there was pressure to do a radio-edit version which came down to about five-and-a-half minutes … and yet it’s gotten lots of play and is generating attention for the album.”
The band’s appeal on the road is, however, a matter of record. Rush started its Clockwork Angels tour on Sept. 7, accompanied by a string section to recreate some of the new album’s songs as well as some of the group’s older material. Composer/orchestrator David Campbell, who worked on the album, has written new arrangements for the live show and will even conduct the strings on early tour dates.
“It’s just something else that’s different for us,” Lifeson says, “and I can’t wait to hear what it sounds like. It’s a whole new show. It’s new staging, new lighting, everything is new and fresh about it. I would say that it’s an evolutionary extension of what the Time Machine tour was, but we are definitely freshening it up and there’ll be a lot of new video stuff going on.”