A Little Thought Exercise

[danielmclark]

In many other artistic fields, it's acceptable to go back and rework something that came before. Movies get remade, music gets covered, comics get rehashed (especially origin stories). I was thinking... in almost all cases, it's someone else that does the remake, not the original artist. But, what if that weren't the case?

 

If Rush were tasked with going back and remaking an early album, what would it sound like? I don't mean simply rerecording the songs, that would be boring. We have live shows to hear their modern interpretations of Limelight or Cygnus. What if the challenge was to rewrite the album from the ground up using only the theme of each track? No original lyrics, no original music. All they would get is the title of the song and the overall theme of the song.

 

"Okay guys, the song is called The Spirit of Radio. The theme is freedom in music, the state of the industry and the commercialization of music. Go."

 

How many lyrics would come out close to their original versions because Neil can still relate to the frame of mind he was in when he wrote them? We know that Alex and Geddy are pretty down on keyboards these days, how would that affect a rewrite of Middletown Dreams or Subdivisions?

 

If you're into comics at all, you may remember Marvel's Stan Lee did a bunch of books where he took nothing but the name of a DC character and created his own spin on it - basically a "What if Stan Lee had created...". The results were pretty interesting.