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Neil Peart, Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Thu, Mar 28, 2024

Updates and other random Rush stuff

Fri, May 25, 2012@11:36AM | comments removed/disabled

This past week we were treated to a series of new band interviews and magazine articles promoting the upcoming release of Rush's Clockwork Angels album, including a Classic Rock magazine cover feature. The 7-page article is contained in the July, 2012 issue of Classic Rock and the cover (seen here) shows a great picture of the band with the tagline RUSH: Steampunks, Musical Scientists, Goofballs - The Rise and Rise of the World's Biggest Cult Band. John over at Cygnus-X1.net transcribed the entire article earlier this week and made it available online at this location. The article contains interviews with all three band members along with Rush documentary filmmaker Sam Dunn and producer Nick Raskulinecz. It mostly discusses the new album but they also touch on other various other subjects including the untimely passing of Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan, the Rush documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage, Alex's acting side projects and the band's future. There were also 2 Geddy Lee interviews; one in the latest issue of Prog magazine, and another in Spin. Geddy spoke mostly about the concept behind and the making of the Clockwork Angels album but also touched on a few other subjects including this interesting update on the much-anticipated Vapor Trails remix in the Prog interview:

That was an idea but it's now been shifted down. Rather than remix the entire album we might now take a bunch of different songs from albums and get different people to remix them for fun, rather than just do Vapor Trails. It's an idea in flux.

Probably the best Clockwork Angels interview to date is Alex Lifeson's Metal Express Radio interview from earlier this week. Alex talks at length about the new album, with some track-specific analysis of his solos on several of the songs. You can read the entire interview at this link. Then just this morning MusicRadar.com posted an interview with Alex where he dissects the album track-by-track, offering up his unique perspective on each and every one of the 12 songs. He clarifies that Caravan was not re-recorded but just remixed, and BU2B had a new intro recorded to open up the track. Here's what he had to say about the closing track of the album - The Garden:

"The Garden was one of the first songs we came up with for the record. Actually, Ged wrote most of it. He did some work one evening, and I came in the next day and heard that opening bass part and the verse. The idea was that we would keep it simple and heartfelt. The sentiment was very much about being at the end, of being retrospective, so there had to be a sweetness to it.

"Nick was a little wary of it getting too sweet, however. The demo was very acoustic. The piano parts were there, as were the strings, but everything was kind of soft. Nick wanted us to toughen it up some.

"We stepped in a little bit more on the bridges and the choruses - it doesn't have the light strumming of the verses - and we developed the whole middle section. The solo is one of my favorites. It's so suited to the rest of the music. When I listen to it, my eyes well up with tears. There's something about it that grabs me, the way it fits in with the rest of music.

"The outro chorus keeps building and building and building... until it gets to that that final breath. It's a great way to end the record."

You can read the entire interview at this link. There were also a couple more Clockwork Angels reviews this week; one from music journalist and author of the 2004 Rush bio Contents Under Pressure Martin Popoff, who gives the album a 10 out of 10 in this review, and a much more succinct review from UK website UberRock.com.

Author Kevin J. Anderson talks a little about how the idea to write a companion novel to the Clockwork Angels album came about in this article at SFSignal.com:

...[Neil Peart] began writing me about the new concept he had for the next Rush album, a steampunk fantasy adventure, Clockwork Angels, and over the course of about two years we talked about the songs he was writing, the story he had in mind, the characters, the villains, the scenes, and I began structuring it into a novel. ...

Earlier this week Rush announced the addition of 3 more dates to the 2013 European leg of the Clockwork Angels tour; a June 2nd show at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, Holland; a June 8th headlining performance at the Sweden Rock Festival - their first European festival in 34 years, and a June 10th show at the Hartwell Arena in Helsinki, Finland. Fan and VIP pre-sales for Helsinki kicked off yesterday morning and are currently underway. The fan pre-sale for Amsterdam will begin on July 1st with the general on-sale on July 2nd. More details will be released closer to the on-sale date, and the same goes for the Sweden Rock Festival. Tickets for the 2nd Toronto show on October 16th went on sale yesterday at 10AM, and VIP pre-sales for that show are now sold out. Now that tickets are on sale for all of the US/Canada dates, I thought it was time for a new poll. How have you or how will you get your tickets for the US/Canada leg? Take the poll and let us know. Eddie Trunk and Q104.3FM in New York will be hosting a pre/post-show party for the Brooklyn show on October 22nd with Rush tribute band Snakes & Arrows. For details/tickets visit littlefieldnyc.com. In the several band interviews that have been released over the past week the subject of the tour has come up several times. Alex had the following to say regarding the set list in his recent Metal Express Radio interview:

We've been throwing about set lists for the last couple of weeks and the length of the set is creeping up to over 4 hours so we'll have to reign it in and fine tune it. There'll be a good portion of new material and some older stuff that we'll be revisiting that you haven't heard in a long time. There's also a couple that we haven't played live before that we`re thinking about doing. There's quite a few in contention for the final set list. ... [2112] will be in there, in the big hat but we`re concentrating on our new tour right now and that's all we can really think of directly if I can put it like that.

Geddy was asked about the stage show for the upcoming tour in his Spin magazine interview:

... we're gonna expand upon the whole steampunk element that we brought on the "Time Machine Tour." We're gonna have fun with that whole kinda machinery and we're designing rear-screen things and have a fun little movies. Hopefully it can all tie together in some ludicrous way.

And Geddy also had the following to say about the set list in his recent Prog magazine interview:

We're just putting the set-list together right now so I can't really comment on it. We'll have a lot of variety though, and we'll be changing things around a bit. Obviously there's some stalwart songs that you can't drop without fans killing you. But we're trying to mix it up and make it interesting.

For the TMS Top Five segment on this past week's episode of That Metal Show, Eddie Trunk and the crew compiled their list of the Top 5 Keyboardists and making the list at #3 was Geddy Lee. You can watch the complete episode online at this link - the TMS Top 5 segment begins at about the 7-minute mark.

Sean Highkin of pop culture website Digital Refrain recently wrote an essay on Rush titled Wheels Within Wheels: A Completely Subjective History of Rush (Part I: 1974-75) which you can check out at this link (thanks Daniel G).

Google helped to celebrate the 78th birthday of the late Robert Moog on Wednesday by featuring a very cool interactive Google Doodle on their home page. Moog was the inventor of the Moog synthesizer which was heavily utilized by Rush back in the '70s. This article at mashable gives the inside story on how this doodle came about.

Long time Rush Collector Jim from Scotland is selling hundreds of Rare Rush Items through his website at www.resistmusic.com. If you're a collector his stuff is definitely worth checking out.

Yesterday was the 24th of May - the historical date of Victoria Day in Canada, and the date immortalized by Neil Peart in the lyrics to the Rush classic Lakeside Park. Here's Rush performing the tune live from way back in 1976.

That's it for this week. Have a fun and safe holiday weekend everybody!

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