Last year, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced that Rush are reuniting for their first tour in more than a decade. The shows will also be the group’s first without late drummer Neil Peart, who died in 2020, with Anika Nilles taking over behind the kit.
Along with their “Fifty Something” comeback tour, Lee is now hinting that new music could be on the horizon.
“My intent, before we got into this celebration of Rush’s history, was to put some music together,” he said in a new interview with Music Radar. “Now, I assumed I would be doing that on my own, not with Alex, but when we started jamming, I started seeing the possibility of doing something with Alex — but all of that went on hold now because there’s too much work. There’s too much work to do for this tour to even think about that.”
“But if we manage to survive the tour, and go back to Canada and have a rest, who knows what’ll happen, but I suspect some music will eventually come out,” he revealed.
Lee added that he is interested in exploring what drummer Anika Nilles could bring to the band in a studio setting.
“It would be fun to see what [Anika] can do in a creative situation. Like, that would be fun. But it’s all speculation until it isn’t, so…”
Ironically, Lee admitted in an interview with CBC news in October that before Nilles joined the band she “was not a Rush fan.”
“When she first came over here [to Canada], we started playing some of the songs, trying to translate Rush music to someone who didn’t really grow up as a Rush fan; she was not a Rush fan. She knew, of course, of Neil’s playing — every drummer knows who Neil is, or Neil was, I should say — so it was a bit of a daunting task,” he said.
“And we had to go through each song and explain the nuances of the song and the idiosyncratic nature of how our songs are put together. So at times she was a bit overwhelmed, but she’s an incredibly hard worker. She’s got great technical facility and she’s just got a really positive attitude, and that’s really good for Alex and I to be around right now.”
