Hold Your Fire...

[Todem]

Top 10 Rush album for me. Always have loved this album.

 

My song rankings:

 

1. Mission

2. Time Stand Still

3. Force 10

4. Lock and Key

5. Turn The Page

6. Open Secrets

7. Prime Mover

8. High Water

9. Second Nature

10. Tai Shan

 

And not a weak track on this album. It was a polarizing album for a lot of older school Rush fans.....but it also dawned a new generation of Rush fans.

 

I was 17 at the time this released and worked at Camelot Music. I always played this cassette on my shift LOL. I remember many people asking...who is this. And I would walk them right over to the Rush section and start going into the history of the band. Some people would go....this is Rush? The guys who sing Tom Saywer and that is how I knew this album would be a tremor in the force of the band.

 

To me.....starting with Permanent Waves thru Roll the Bones.....is what defined Rush as a progressive band. They marched to beat of their own drum and wrote some of their very best songs ever during that period. It was a marvelous run of albums for my ears.

 

Counterparts is also a great album....one of the best sounding albums ever. But it was a clear return to the power trio roots and was time as well.

 

But wow.....that 1980-1991 run was magical.

 

Hold Your Fire was an album that could have used some more balls in the mix but was a clear production of the times and where Rush’s headspace was at. It also almost broke the band up as Alex was flipping out LOL. Neil regarded this as one of his very favorites. What was always impressive to me was the HYF tour. They pulled all these complex songs off live to a tee. Brilliant. And in future tours they beefed up the sound on songs like Force 10 and Mission.

 

There is not one album as more controversial/polarizing among the hard core fan base.

 

It will always have it’s detractors and it’s enthusiastic supporters (me).

[Geddyleegenes]

...so even if a song like Tai Shan is not very "Rushlike", I still think it's a worthy addition, and frankly more interesting than anything on Test For Echo or Snakes And Arrows.

 

I feel like I'm in the minority in that the stinker on the record for me is Turn The Page. I find it cloying and robotic and soulless.

 

Well, you certainly can't be chided for not having an opinion!

 

I'm not going to try to change your opinion, just respond with my own. I can't comprehend how you could find Tai Shan more interesting than anything on Test or Snakes. I myself consider Tai Shan to be my absolute least favorite Rush song, therefore I find every song on Test and Snakes much more interesting. Geddy Lee considers Tai Shan "an error". Alex Lifeson has said that Tai Shan is one of the worst songs the band ever recorded. It was a very personal song for Neil Peart and musically, Geddy and Alex couldn't give the lyrics what they needed.

 

Turn The Page is my second favorite on HYF. "Soulless"? There is absolutely no such thing whatsoever when it comes to any Rush song.

 

But again, just my opinion and I can respect yours.

[Timbale]

...so even if a song like Tai Shan is not very "Rushlike", I still think it's a worthy addition, and frankly more interesting than anything on Test For Echo or Snakes And Arrows.

 

I feel like I'm in the minority in that the stinker on the record for me is Turn The Page. I find it cloying and robotic and soulless.

 

Well, you certainly can't be chided for not having an opinion!

 

I'm not going to try to change your opinion, just respond with my own. I can't comprehend how you could find Tai Shan more interesting than anything on Test or Snakes. I myself consider Tai Shan to be my absolute least favorite Rush song, therefore I find every song on Test and Snakes much more interesting. Geddy Lee considers Tai Shan "an error". Alex Lifeson has said that Tai Shan is one of the worst songs the band ever recorded. It was a very personal song for Neil Peart and musically, Geddy and Alex couldn't give the lyrics what they needed.

 

Turn The Page is my second favorite on HYF. "Soulless"? There is absolutely no such thing whatsoever when it comes to any Rush song.

 

But again, just my opinion and I can respect yours.

 

And I can respect yours as well. :)

 

I guess for me, I think that the songs where they stretch the boundaries of what they "usually" do are ones that I find interesting. Obviously, Rush had a long run where they were pretty much knocking everything out of the park, experimental or not...but I think things like Madrigal, Different Strings, Losing It and yes, even Tai Shan are fascinating, because they were not sticking to a hard rock formula. To my ears, that stuff is actually progressive, because they're not being bound to a formula. Tai Shan is not a favourite song of mine...but I'd rather hear it than most of S&A (Far Cry being an exception), because most of that record is just a sludgey, samey, unmemorable sounding album where nothing is unusual or very noteworthy. Same with T4E. Both those records are mostly made up of songs I could pretty much never hear again and I wouldn't feel any poorer for it...which I can't say for many other Rush albums.

 

As for Turn The Page...I think one of the other things that I don't like about it is that it's one of those Neil lyrics that aren't really about anything substantial. Now, he has a bunch of songs like that, where they are just essentially observations and explorations of a thought process or a state of being, I guess. Prime Mover from HYF is another good example of it. If you wanted to say what Prime Mover was "about"...ummm, I don't know...being alive? It's pretty vague and open to interpretation...but I quite like those lyrics, because the word play is nice and the images are evocative. But Turn The Page is basically "the news and life in general is bad...but we just move on from it"... and it just seems...I don't know, kinda obvious and not really worthy of a song. Or at least, he doesn't have anything to say about it that seems insightful to me.

 

As for "soulless"...it's funny, because I find that other songs on the record connect emotionally with me - Time Stand Still and Mission in particular - both in their content and in the way the band (Geddy as singer especially) deliver them. In that way, Turn The Page by comparison feels very cold and robotic... like it's just too abstract or something. I don't know why I don't feel that way about Prime Mover, but something in the vocal delivery, and maybe the simple but very relatable line "anything can happen" humanizes the song. There feels like some joy in the way he sings it, especially on the outro, that is emotional. Turn The Page makes me feel nothing. And, as I said, so many Rush songs lean into abstraction and thought as opposed to pure emotion - that's the nature of Neil's lyric writing in general - but a song like, say, Natural Science, is interesting enough in its observations that I enjoy it...and when it gets to the last section (Wave after wave, flow with the tides...) I feel something as he's singing it... and that doesn't happen with Turn The Page.

 

And...and this is NOT a criticism of you pointing it out...but in general, I find that an artist's perspective on their own work is not that valuable to me as a consumer of their work. We in general hold the artist's opinion of their work higher than other peoples'...but it doesn't really make much sense. They may have insight into its creation, but once it's out in the world as a thing....their opinion might actually be more screwed, and therefore less valuable than someone elses. Like, for me, Geddy's best vocal performance is the Signals album. If he came out and said he thought he sang poorly on those songs...it wouldn't matter at all. So the fact that those two guys don't like Tai Shan means as much to me as people who can't listen to 5 seconds of Rush without throwing something at the wall. :)