Rush was never meant to play the same style of music forever. Although the band claimed to wear their influences on their sleeve on the first record, it wasn’t until Neil Peart entered the fold that they began to experiment with what they could do with the rock genre, stretching their songs out into elongated jams that often told extravagant stories about the human condition. While Peart was proud of almost every album he participated in, he admitted that one song was the first bold step forward for them.
When talking about the moment when everything clicked for the band, it all started with 2112. After having modest success with albums like Fly By Night, their fourth outing gave them total artistic freedom from their label, allowing them to stretch as far as they wanted to on albums like A Farewell to Kings.
Even though the band could show off their chops on albums like Hemispheres, there came a point where they needed to move away from the large epics that they created. Influenced by the sounds of new wave music coming out of England, 1980’s Permanent Waves would see them incorporating elements of reggae music a la The Police on tracks like ‘The Spirit of Radio’, which would become a modest radio hit.
After spending time on the road honing their craft, the band settled into the studio to create their most commercial album yet with Moving Pictures. While still holding onto their prog roots, the power trio turned in some of the most accessible songs of their career, putting immortal anthems like ‘Tom Sawyer’ alongside instrumentals that were too catchy to ignore, like ‘YYZ’.
While the album would be their commercial peak, it also introduced keyboards as a foundational part of their sound. For the next few years, the band’s studio output would be dominated by the instrument, starting with the song ‘Subdivisions’ off their following album, Signals. Written around the alienation of youth, Peart’s words are driven by Geddy Lee’s keyboard accents, with Alex Lifeson playing a more subdued role behind the fretboard.
Even though Lifeson wouldn’t look back on this era fondly, Peart had a different perspective on how the keyboards were implemented. When talking about the band’s legacy, Peart would single out ‘Subdivisions’ as a turning point in the group’s career, thinking that they incorporated new instruments with ease.
For as much controversy as the single stirred up, Peart remained defiantly proud of their experiments, telling CBC, “It was an important step for us, the first song written that was keyboard-based. The upside of that: people don’t realise is that it made Alex [Lifeson] and I the rhythm section. So the first time he and I tuned in to each other’s parts was when Geddy [Lee] was playing keyboards. It was a great new way for us to relate”.
While the band would eventually get themselves out of their neon-flavoured funk in the 1990s, that rhythmic foundation between Lifeson and Peart would become instrumental in the following years, featuring Lifeson emphasising his rhythmic vocabulary on albums like Vapor Trails. This may have been a different direction than most fans were used to, but as far as Peart was concerned, no genre was out of the question for Rush.
