Rush

Rush

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CLOSER TO THE HEART
Rush Get a Breath of Fresh Air with Vapor Trails
Fickle public tastes never sidetracked Rush, nor did the band's own restless energy -- which led the Canadian power trio to tinker with everything from 20-minute dissertations about futuristic dilemmas to pop songs sweet enough for Top 40 radio. The only thing to give the band pause, it seems, was real life, which dealt a double blow to drummer/lyricist Neil Peart in the mid-'90s, when he lost his wife to cancer and his daughter in a car accident. As both Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson went on to experiment with solo offerings, fans wondered if Rush would ever return to the rock arena -- a query that's been answered in the affirmative with the long-awaited Vapor Trails. It's the hardest, most aggressive album from the 34-year-old band in many a moon -- and that's one of the topics that Lee and Lifeson discussed with Barnes & Noble.com's David Sprague when the pair ventured down from the Great White North.

Barnes & Noble.com: Did the circumstances going in to making this record make it difficult to do, emotionally, or even on a practical level?

Geddy Lee: Obviously, there was time needed to arrive at a level of comfort where emotions weren't clouding the communication. That took a while, and we were prepared for that. We had no deadline, no time constraints, so Neil could get comfortable, build his confidence, build his trust in what he did. As a result, we used a bare-bones crew -- just us and one or two other people. That worked out quite well.

B&N.com: Was there a thought that it might not happen at all?

Alex Lifeson: We were all quite wounded by what had happened with Neil. I think the recovery Neil went through was very gradual; it was bumpy, it had its ups and downs, and it reached a point where after a couple of years, he seemed to regress into a very dark period. If there was ever a time when we thought it would never happen again, it was then. But our thought was that making him better was the priority, and if he never felt he could come back to work, that would be completely understandable. We only really cared about him.

B&N.com: Was the project one that took a few tries to get into, or once you started, did it move fairly quickly?

GL: It was a long project, and there were a lot of failures before we finally found the capability to tap into where we needed to go. We had a lot of junk to get out of the way, some emotional, some rust from not having played together. We wrote some pretty crappy songs and threw those out and then got into gear.

B&N.com: You did have your solo projects to keep you fresh, though.

GL: As much as our solo things were good at keeping us sharp, it didn't really help us lock. It felt weird at first; we were sort of going through the motions when it came to jamming together. After making so many records, we had to sit back and find the angle, find out why we were making this record, and that was really difficult this time.

B&N.com: Do you sit down together to work songs out, or are you in the post-millennial realm of swapping tapes through the mail, or computer servers?

GL: No, we get together in the same building where we all have our different areas. Usually Alex and I are in one area working, and Neil works in his own area. We like to be able to be around.

B&N.com: Vapor Trails is a heavier sounding record. Did you think about that going in?

AL: It's certainly heavier than anything we've done in at least ten years. I know we wanted to make an intense record, and that translated into a degree of heaviness. There was a focus on getting something powerful and passionate.

B&N.com: What's the hardest part about making it fresh after a quarter century of doing this.

GL: Trying to find something you've never done before, or, since we've been doing this so long, do it in a slightly different way. At first, you feel like you're just regurgitating what you've done before, but then you can lock onto something that makes you feel you're opening a door. The door cracks, and you're in, like that.

B&N.com: Rush has a very vocal, very rabid fan base: Do you ever go out into cyberspace to hear what they are saying?

AL: Sometimes, and it's mostly complimentary. Very few people take the time to write in and tell us we suck. [laughs]

B&N.com: You've gone through many stylistic periods. Ever feel like breaking out with one of those side-long epics again?

GL: Most of our albums are thematic -- Hemispheres, 2112 -- the songs are tied together. The form might change, but the spirit remains. That was our style way back when, and in some ways that's a much easier way of writing. Trying to write short songs that tie up and relate is much more of a challenge and a strain. Some of the middle sections of this record are in that vein.

B&N.com: Did you work on Vapor Trails in a vacuum, or with a lot of other people involved?

AL: We generally felt we were producing ourselves, although we brought Paul Northfield in to give some input. He'd worked with us on Permanent Waves, and he was able to tell us that some things weren't going to happen. It's very difficult to remain objective, so outside input is very important. It's all about the fresh air.

May 2002