Timbale

The band members do not seem to be particularly interested archivists, so I think the answer is "no"...but I alway wonder about the rear projection clips that they used over the years. I was a bit surprised on the R40 tour that they didn't use some vintage back-projection stuff -- it seems like it would have fit in so well with the tour concept. Like, I don't remember if they played Red Barchetta on the final tour, but if they did, using that video-game-level animation seen on the ESL video would have been funny and awesome. Every now and then a live picture emerges that I've never seen before, and there's some projection behind them that I don't recognize and can't place what song it would be. Do you think they literally just chucked that stuff into the garbage because it was "dated"? I would take a DVD of that stuff in the next box set over most of the gack they throw in those...

Very jealous you saw Elliott Smith. Wow.

Van Halen were great players and created their own little corner of the hard rock world...but the songwriting is just no contest for me. The Who all the way.

Is Zak Starkey getting back behind the kit for it?

1. First Concert? Technically, Harry Chapin with my family. The first rock concert I went to without parents was Rush, Maple Leaf Gardens, Sept '84. 2. Last Concert? I've been out of the concert loop for a while - go to see many friends' bands play locally, but I think my last show was Jon Batiste about 3 years ago. 3. Worst Concert? Sandra Bernhard, some time in the 90s. Thought it would be a comedy show, but she had a band and played AWFUL covers of Stones and other classic rock songs. It was unbearable. 4. Loudest Concert? I can't remember the band, but it was at the Ottawa Blues Festival -- the drummer's snare was like an icepick in my ear for every 2 and 4. 5. Best Concert? Hard call, but probably Tom Waits in 1999. 6. Seen the Most? Rush - I think 12 times. 7. Most Surprising? Jon Batiste - a close call to the crown of best concert. He was astonishing -- like Prince, James Brown and McCoy Tyner all wrapped up into one. 8. Happy I got to see? Leonard Cohen. I saw him twice before he passed. I am grateful that he went back to touring in his later years. It was a semi-religious experience both times. 9. Wish I could have seen? Genesis. Of course I would have LOVED to have seen them with Gabriel, but even seeing the Phil-led band in its heyday would have been great. I considered this most recent (final) tour, but I just didn't think the magic would be there...and the Chester/Phil double drum thing was such a big part of what made their post - Gabriel shows great. 10. Next Concert? At this point, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit in March of next year. He's quickly become an all time fave -- great songwriter and a hell of a guitarist to boot.

Glad to see you back, Chem!

This record is killing me.

For a lot of it I used the actual apps on an ipad to play the parts. I also used a controller to trigger those app sounds for some of it. On the whole album, I think I used one plugin sound - a synth arp (which I only layered into an existing arp I had already played) - it just wasn't an avenue I went down...although I know it is an almost endless source of sounds. I know it seems kind of weird to do the drums last. With every song on the album, I just ran a very simple drum loop to create over top of, knowing I would be replacing it with a real drum performance and auxiliary percussion. It's sort of the one thing I'm actually confident with as a performer, haha, so I left it 'til last. Although saying that... I went through a cancer diagnosis and treatment last year, and the drums were all done during and just after chemo...so it was unbelievably challenging and physically really hard. But, it also, emotionally speaking, gave me something to focus on during that time, which I really needed. (Sorry if that's TMI...)

Thank you, Blackhawk. The lyrics are a response to a piece of art about the colonial residential school system in Canada. https://witnessblanket.ca/

Thank you, Jarg - much appreciated. Yeah, that fill is very much in the "In the Air" world...it's kinda the same fill offset by one note, which didn't totally strike me until after I'd done it, haha. I knew it was a "Phill-esque" fill... and the drum machine is also more than a little reminiscent of that song, too. A lot of the song is made up of Mellotron sounds. I am not fortunate enough to have access to one of those in real life...I use quite good digital samples of the original tapes through an app called the M3000HD. The kind of main chordal part is a mix of mellotron flute and I think oboe, which was the first thing I came up with. I then put that drumbox beat to it, which fit the mood well, I thought, and carried on from there. There are some synthy sounds - including the bass - that are a Moog synth called Animoog, and then I think a sound or two that are from a digital replication of a Prophet synth. The kind of high, etherial sound in the song is a synth sound I used a lot on the record - sometimes, if you play it with two notes and bend them down, it almost creates a lap steel effect. The album has no guitar on it...I wanted to make a sort of singer/songwriter album but without either a guitar or piano at the centre of it. It's not that I have anything against those instruments, I just thought it would be interesting sonically to not have something so familiar in the middle. The drums themselves were the last thing to go on, actually. As soon as I got a little ways into the song, I knew I wanted the drums to have that Collins-like thing with no hi hat or ride cymbal keeping time. Thanks for listening to it!

Hey friends -- so I have been a musician for most of my adult life, predominantly playing drums in other peoples' projects. I have just released my first ever album of my own music, playing everything myself. I thought I'd share a song here if you care to check it out. :)

Jordan and Conan are one of my favourite duos...there is a ton of great stuff on youtube when he was a producer on the tv show. It was a real treat to see Geddy dropped into that mix.

Yeah, this is fantastic. She gets the heart of the song very quickly. I'm sure there will be people who see this and think "her part isn't as good as Peart's", but it's hardly the point. She listened to this piece of music that Lee and Lifeson created and applied artistry and feel to it (in like, 2 or 3 swings it looks like) and killed it.

Jimmy Page by a large margin -- but I personally don't value guitar riffs very much.

He is responsible for the biggest jump in quality (from Grace Under Pressure to Power Windows) production-wise, in their catalogue. It's pretty amazing that he produced PW and Counterparts. I wonder what the run of albums in between would have sounded like if they hadn't taken the offramp to Rupert Hine. RIP to a talented soul.

Wait, @Entre_Perpetuo - are you saying you refuse to believe that Neil Peart could make mistakes?

I think there are times when Geddy as a vocalist really connected with the emotion of what Neil was saying... and I think Middletown Dreams is definitely one of those times.

Thanks, friend.

But I will try.

I had a friend who loved early Who (a band that I completely adore), but he really hated the Who Are You album, and pretty much everything that Townshend wrote after that. I remember him saying "as soon as Pete learned a couple jazz chords and tried to write "serious" music, it all went to hell." Now, I don't agree with that at all -- but I get what he meant. I can see why he would say that, being a lover of the early stuff. But it's somehow related to how I feel about Steely Dan. It's like it's too clever for its own good. I sorta wanna say to them, "just go be in a jazz band, stop writing pop songs with all your stupid chord extensions in there". 😉 I'm being a smart ass...but there's just something there that irks me, despite all the talent clearly on display.

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, specifically connected to the anniversary of Grace Under Pressure this year. Grace Under Pressure was the first Rush album that I awaited the release of. I do not remember Signals coming into the world — I was 10 years old when it was released and just becoming a fan, so it and all the albums prior were just “there”. By the time there was talk of a new album, I was a die hard fan. Somehow, I had never thought about the timing of any of this until seeing something about the 40th anniversary. My 12th birthday was at the end of February…and my parents got divorced a couple weeks after that. P/G was released in early April. It was THE piece of music I was obsessed by, right as my family was dissolving. I think of that now and it kinda blows my mind. It was speaking, on an emotional level, to exactly the place I was at. A place of fear, uncertainty, hurt and darkness. From the first grim image of the ill wind arising — and the warning that there’s no swimming in the heavy water and no singing in the acid rain — it was speaking to where I felt like I was at. The chorus felt like something I longed for someone to say to me right then “I see the tip of the iceberg, and I worry about you.” I was by no means like the homeless guy who was living in John Lennon’s garden, telling him that he thought “boy, you’re gonna carry that weight” was written directly TO him — I wasn’t delusional or anything — but that lyric felt very personal. And of course the second song was all about loss. Again, until very recently I had never made this connection…but “Suddenly, you were gone, from all the lives you left your mark upon” feels incredibly descriptive of my mom moving out, and in general that feeling of loss that can occur to a kid when their family unit ceases to exist as it had before. And the rest of the record just continues with that dark feeling of paranoia, loss, and fear. It’s sort of amazing to me that that stuff was my main intake in that time. I have a very strong memory of seeing the video for Distant Early Warning for the first time on the little black and white TV my mom had in her crappy little basement apartment that she had moved out to. That record is just completely married to that life experience for me. I actually feel lucky about it. I could have been one of those kids who loved, I don’t know…Kiss or something, who was getting nothing of lyrical substance from the music they loved. Or I could have been a kid who loved some metal band that was super nihilistic and talking about ending it all. Instead, I was deeply into a smart, literate and conceptual band that was grappling with the uncertainty all around them. Of hard times. It is a cold album, but that coldness is an emotion I felt so strongly then, and so P/G is a very emotional record for me. And about 6 months later, I saw my first ever rock concert, and there they were, playing those dark songs (among others) as the cameras swirled around them at Maple Leaf Gardens. It felt like an emotional catharsis.

For a long time I considered it a lesser song -- a catchy, straightforward piece that doesn't have much to it. Over the years I've come to appreciate it more, the lyrics in particular. I agree with @chemistry1973, I don't think the arrangement is great, and it could really use another verse. I also agree that Peart's drumming is not great -- I think he found he vibe of it in the ensuing years, however. For me, the main strike against the studio version is Geddy Lee's vocal, which to me is him at his most affected. I remember when I was around 14 years old telling a girl in my class that Rush was from our hometown. She COULDN'T believe it. "That guy sings with a british accent!!" Haha...I've never thought that exactly, but he was doing something around AFTK that doesn't sound natural to me. The version on ESL is completely my go to - his vocal is great (I love the way he sings the "sailing into destiny/closer to the heart" section), the groove (despite it speeding way up in the guitar solo) is good...and the band is not just rushing through the song to get to the mindless 3 chord jam that they seemed to love so much in the 80's and 90's (sorry.)

The Who for sure - '68 to '74. Tommy, Live At Leeds, Who's Next and Quadrophenia. Not as prolific as some (although if you include all of Townshend's demos you can see how busy he was at least), but those 4 records are total masterpieces...and their live shows in that time were on fire, too.