Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have revealed that playing Rush songs together during the filming for the recently-released Neil Peart: No One's Disciple documentary helped reignite their desire to bring their music to the world once again.
In the documentary, co-directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, Lee and Lifeson with four of their late drummer's musical 'brothers' - Stewart Copeland from The Police, Danny Carey from Tool, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree and King Crimson - to revisit some of Rush's classic songs, Working Man, Tom Sawyer, New World Man and 2112: Overture among them. The experience is clearly an emotional and thrilling one for all involved. In fact, in the epilogue for the film - which is currently streaming on Canada's CBC Gem platform - lifelong friends Lee and Lifeson state that playing their music once more served as a catalyst for Rush returning to the road with new live drummer Anika Nilles for the Fifty Something tour.
"It felt special, it felt like an honour, playing with those drummers," Lee says. "Alex and I had been afraid of our own music. We had put our music in a box, and left it as a relic of the past. And by playing them, we realised that we have 50 years and a body of music that is still alive."
Lifeson adds that, for him revisiting Rush's music was "inspiring", and helped kickstart conversations about the duo going back out on tour.
"A big part of the motivation was celebrating the music, celebrating Neil" he says, while acknowledging that replacing Peart was always going to be an "impossible task".
"Anika is coming into this alien world," says Lifeson. "She wasn't really a fan of our music, so there was alot of spooling up she needed to do."
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Lee adds that bringing Nilles into the group helped give him a whole new appreciation of Neil Peart's artistry.
"We were learning what Anika was learning," he says. "We were realizing how different Neil’s feel is from other styles of play. So through Anika’s experiences, we were understanding Neil’s composition better and better. And sometimes Anika would write me and say, “What time is this part in?” And I would go, “Fuck, I don’t know!” So I would go back and listen to it, and I would count it out. And I realized that we wrote parts as musical passages, and we would do a weird musical passage in an odd time signature, but we wouldn’t need to count what that time signature was, ’cause we would just glue a bunch of phrases together and we knew it intrinsically. We knew it inherently... So it was a re-education for me."
Watch the Rolling Stone interview below.
