Rush frontman Geddy Lee, who revealed his favorite drug a few days ago, told Classic Rock Magazine at a recent book signing in Manchester that he has painful back issues when doing signings, and that he also is developing ‘different chops’ in his wrist.
“I haven’t done any official kind of signing since My Favorite Headache in 2000,” says Geddy, coffee in hand. Lee also revealed where Neil Peart is hiding. “So it’s been twenty years. It’s fun. That said, my back doesn’t like it and I’m developing different chops in my wrist – I am standing up there for two hours signing books.”
You can read Classic Rock Magazine for the full article. Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson was asked in a new Sweetwater interview if he discovers new things about old Rush songs when revisiting them today, “There’s a trick, I think, and it comes with experience. And that is, how do you make something simple sound really complicated and difficult? I think as a musician, you hear something on the radio, you process it in a different way. It’s very difficult to listen to music, I think, when you’re a touring musician and you’ve really devoted your life to being a professional musician.
You get very analytical. When I hear a song on the radio, I [think], ‘I know exactly where they’re gonna go.’ This sort of thing. It takes a little bit of the joy out of it, but at the same time, it gives you a keener sense of musical structure and things like that.”
Lifeson added, “What I notice when I go back is, from a guitar standpoint, how I always try to make simple guitar parts sound more difficult. And I always really liked that when I heard it in somebody else. And quite often, if I try to play someone else’s song, I think, ‘How do you play that?’ And you sit down and you play it and you go, ‘Oh my God! This song is four chords.’
But what did that guitarist do to this song to make it sound like it’s not four chords? And that sort of led me to suspended chords and open strings and creating more than one guitarist in a three-piece. So that’s the kind of stuff that I hear when I go back and I think, ‘Oh my God! I really fooled people with that one.’ [Laughs]” Geddy Lee revealed Neil Peart’s comeback project a couple of days ago.
