GEDDY LEE Says RUSH Didn't Play VANCOUVER OLYMPICS Due To Lip-Synching Rules

Spike of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania radio station 94 WYSP conducted an interview with RUSH bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee on Tuesday, April 27. The chat is now available for streaming using the audio player below.

When asked why RUSH was not involved at all with the Vancouver Olympics, which took place in February, Lee said, "Yeah, well, we had an opportunity to play, but there were all kinds of crazy rules going on about lip-synching and stuff like that. That's just not our bag, man."

Regarding the progress of the songwriting and recording sessions for RUSH's new CD, guitarist Alex Lifeson told WAXQ-FM / Q104.3's "Jim Kerr Rock 'n Roll Morning Show" on Tuesday, "There's less emphasis on doing an album. I think, as modern as we wanna be and as contemporary as we wanna be, we've always been an album band. All our albums are conceptual in nature, whether it's more obvious with some than others. And that's certainly the case with this album that we are doing. What's interesting for us and refreshing is to do a couple of songs and release them before a tour and play them on the tour and then go back in and continue writing. The intention from the beginning was to just do a couple of songs and not record them, just play them live. We thought it would be a little more mysterious and special. . . What happened was we started writing and before we knew it, we had six songs that we were quite happy with. There were always the two that we thought were the candidates to do live, and we decided to record them. Now, again, we weren't necessarily intending to release them. But they sounded so great when we recorded them, we really wanna release them now. So we'll release one to radio in about a month, and then two of them will be released around the same time at the beginning of the tour. And then we'll go back in the studio, continue writing some more material, and then record everything probably in the New Year, next year."

RUSH is currently working on its 20th studio album with producer Nick Raskulinecz (co-producer of RUSH's 2007 CD, "Snakes & Arrows") in Nashville.

RUSH has announced the details of the "Time Machine Tour", which will kick off on June 29 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and finish on October 2 in West Palm Beach, Florida, hitting a total of 37 cities. The centerpiece of the trek will be the band's first-ever performance of its classic 1981 album "Moving Pictures" in its entirety. The group will also play other beloved tracks from its catalog as well as new songs that the band has just begun working on at a studio in Toronto.

Lifeson said in a statement, "We were off for a year and a half, and now it's just pouring. Everything is totally crazy and there's not a minute left in the day. We've got these half-dozen songs, and we'll probably go in the studio and work on a couple of them and see how it goes, perhaps release something — and I say perhaps — and then we plan on being on the road."

This will be RUSH's first road trip since touring extensively behind its 2007 studio album, "Snakes & Arrows".

"Moving Pictures", RUSH's eighth studio album, is their most successful release, with four million copies sold in the U.S. It features the hits "Tom Sawyer" and "Limelight", as well as live favorites like "YYZ" and "Red Barchetta".