RUSH Drummer: 'We Have Never Recorded A Song That We Didn't Release'

Jonathan Cohen of Billboard.com recently conducted an interview with RUSH drummer Neil Peart. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Billboard.com: It seemed to me that "Vapor Trails" was a real return to a guitar/bass/drums sound without synthesizers. Were you pleased with that direction and can you see that remaining a key part of the sound?

Neil: Yeah, I can certainly say that it has been so far. We have probably eight songs that we all really like and are really fresh for us and drawing upon different influences and different approaches of writing. With us, it's not a question of arguing among the three of us about things — it's more us arguing with the song, in what it wants to be and how to approach it in that, so it's a very interesting unified conflict. There isn't friction among us but there's often friction between us and the song we're trying to write.

We started working kind of long distance because I'm living in California these days and the other guys are still in Toronto, so we've been trying to work at a distance like that. I'd send some lyrics to the guys and we got together back in March in my house up and Quebec and they played me what they'd been working on. It really was remarkably organic in a way that I haven't heard [from RUSH] before. We spent a month together in May working on those songs and developing our individual instrument parts for them. It's early to characterize it, but it's definitely fresh and different and that's certainly satisfying.

Billboard.com: You guys have always done a good job of filling the gap between tour cycles with live releases. Is there ever going to be a grand vault clean out, or is there nothing in there like that?

Neil: We don't have anything, actually. We have never recorded a song that we didn't release. I call it laziness, I mean, we would never have gone to all that trouble and then not put it out. Certainly we've abandoned many songs along the way — lost faith in them, is the way I always put it because we have a built-in barometer, and if we're not motivated enough to work on the song, then to us it's not worth it. On the other hand if we are motivated, it is worth it, and it's gonna come out. I remember that "Caress of Steel", in the old days of cassettes, had very uneven side lengths. I think one side was 20 minutes and the other was 25, and the record company wanted us to drop a song. We said, "No way! We went to all that trouble, it's going on the record." So there is literally nothing unreleased. For us, there really is no vault to clean out.

Read the entire interview at Billboard.com.