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After the first few listens of CA, I would have ranked this as my least favorite. But it's still not a bad song. Not great, but not bad. In other words, I don't think CA has any BAD songs. And that's a pretty good way for a storied band to go out. My least favorite song on CA is now Seven Cities of Gold. It too is not bad, but I'll dive into it more when it appears on the list.

It's the same handful of people taking the time to respond to each song. Would like to see more people participating. Albums you'd expect to see populating the bottom part of the list are there (lots of T4E, Feedback and Presto songs, no MP or PeW yet), though only two from HYF so far, which is interesting. hi_water will give a song a higher ranking if he likes the lyrics, even if the song is dogshit musically (Second Nature, Larger Bowl). That's his right, of course. It's his list.

As far as first impressions, where the thread is posted doesn't matter if you first see it in the Recent Topics sidebar, like I just did. All I saw at first was "Rest in Peace, David Gilmour."

They lyrics are indeed cringy -- they were cringy when this album came out in '96, and they're even moreso now. Neil wasn't particularly good at topical lyric writing, and Pye Dubois' collaboration couldn't save this one. Musically, this song is pretty solid. I could see this ranked a bit higher, only because there are still a few T4E songs not yet ranked that should be ranked considerably lower than this one.

I like this tune a lot, but I hate that the remix added the guitar solo back in. The boys left it out of the original mix for a reason -- the power chords worked great by themselves. I'd have ranked this higher.

It really is a weird song. Someone brought up the lyrics in another thread recently, mocking the "Catch the spirit, catch the spit" lines, but I argued that the quirky lyrics (co-written by Pye Dubois) fit the song perfectly because the whole song is quirky. The song may have repeated sections, but it doesn't have the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure that most non-prog pop and rock songs have. It says a lot that Rush's two biggest hits -- Tom Sawyer and Spirit of Radio -- are anything but typical rock songs. They're "accessible" but still distinctly Rush.

This. Another utterly forgettable filler track.

Yeah, I could see ranking those two that low. I didn't mind Good News First at first but the vocals wore thin real fast. That's a song like Second Nature that for me just doesn't feel like a Rush song. It's kind of country-ish or something.

This and Bravest Face are my least favorites from S&A. I'd have ranked this way lower. Hopefully we'll see Good News First soon because that one ain't great either.

So, let's say it's a quarter to eight...what are you feeling?

Happy birthday, launch!

73 is getting concerned!

I'd forgotten what the Blondie song sounded like, hadn't heard it in decades. So I listened. Not a bad little tune. Still doesn't beat The Cars, though.

FINALLY. In case no one's noticed based on my previous annoying posts in this thread, this is a bottom-1 song for me. Maybe even lower than that. Why? Any song that sounds like it was written for Celine Dion does not belong on a Rush record. This is the same band that wrote Hemispheres? That's messed up, man.

Arkin and Peter Falk were perfectly cast in The In-Laws. And the part of Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross was perfect for him. RIP.

Definitely top-100 at least. Top-3 from this album, IMO.

https://www.mlb.com/news/domingo-german-perfect-game-vs-athletics

This one could have been ranked lower. Half of RTB ranked in the bottom-40 seems about right, though.

Yeah, that works! I'm not sure you need to list all the remaining songs from the album, but that's up to you. Recapping the songs already ranked is nice info to have.

Agreed.

May I offer a suggestion? I like that you indicate that this is the third song from this album to make it to the list, which is very useful in illustrating, at this current position, how strong or weak an album is in your overall ranking. I wouldn't mind also seeing the other two songs from VT that you've already listed, and where you ranked them. We can then see how other songs from the album is doing at a glance.

RTB suffered the same fate for me after CP came out. As a Rush fan who got into them in 1980 with PeW, there was a certain resignation with RTB, like, okay, this is what Rush is now -- they're this light-sounding pop-rock band with a Rush influence. It was easy to think that way when you looked at RTB, Presto, HYF and even PoW as a whole -- RTB was clearly a continuation of their journey away from their hard prog heyday. There wasn't much of a progression from Presto to RTB, and that's where the resignation came from for me. CP was what RTB and maybe even Presto should have been -- a big f**k you to HYF and the keyboard era. It wasn't a return to hard prog, but it was organic-sounding with heavy guitars, bass and drums. A step in the right direction. T4E grabbed me instantly because it was, at least sonically, a continuation of CP. The guitars were even heavier, and I loved it. At least, at first. The songs didn't hold up over time, though the title track, Driven and Time And Motion are still go-to listens.

Pretty inventive stuff there. I dug it.