Rush member Geddy Lee recently took to his Instagram account and shared his thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict as a year has passed since it started, leading to some fans being upset.
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Meanwhile, when it comes to songwriting, some bands choose to stick with a winning formula throughout their career. Others often change their style and approach from time to time.
While looking back on the recording career of Rush, they certainly belong in the latter category. During a recent interview with Booked on Rock, Daniel Bukszpan, the author of the book “Rush at 50,” pointed out how, by the dawn of the ’80s, Rush had made a concerted effort to switch gears stylistically. And while they gained a larger following, they may have lost some of their earlier fans.
“Geddy Lee even said that the time of ‘Hemispheres,’ he felt like they were getting formulaic,” Bukszpan explained.
“Because you had ‘Farewell to Kings’ before that, which ends with ‘Cygnus X-1,’ and then ‘Hemispheres’ starts with ‘Cygnus X-1 Book II.’ And I think he felt like maybe there was just too much similarity between the two records. The whole band felt, ‘We need to keep moving. We need to keep doing new things. We need to keep incorporating new things into our music.'”
Having new wave bands such as The Police, Talking Heads, and Devo catching the attention of the trio, their influence could be detected at times on Rush’s 1980 effort, “Permanent Waves”. And the move paid off, as it spawned such classic tunes as “The Spirit of Radio” and “Freewill” and became a top-5 LP in the US, UK, and Canada.
“‘Permanent Waves,’ just from start to finish, it’s this whole new lease on life,” Bukszpan added.
“It’s a very shiny album in a lot of ways, the music is. It’s very crisp. And they had I think really wanted to make a point with it. And I think they did. That is, of course, where the synthesizers started creeping in. Which, they did start to lose some people with that. But I never had any problem with it. I thought it sounded great.”
Rush would continue in this stylistic direction, leading to what many consider to be the greatest album of their entire career, 1981’s “Moving Pictures”.
