RUSH Frontman Talks Upcoming Album, Tour

Greg Prato of RollingStone.com recently conducted an interview with RUSH bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

RollingStone.com: Will you release some new songs to coincide with the tour?

Geddy Lee: I'd imagine — because we don't have time to do more than two at the moment — we'll probably release one as soon as it's ready, before the tour starts, and then probably release the second one as the tour starts. But our hope was to really get something down on tape, so we could play these songs live and road test them in a way. We're still kind of throwing titles back in forth, but one is called "Caravan".

RollingStone.com: Why tour in the middle of recording an album?

Geddy Lee: Everybody was kind of itching to get on the road and try and get in "peak playing form" before we recorded the bulk of the record, just to see what that effect is. In a way, we have this tendency to take a long period of time off, and then we kind of get our chops together and then go record. We thought it's kind of ass-backwards really, because when you finish a long tour, you're in such amazing playing shape that really, that's the time you should go in and start laying down tracks. But of course, you're exhausted by then, so we're trying to figure out if there's another way of attacking it.

We thought it would be fun to put together a tour that was sort of "future/past," because those are some of the themes that are floating around the lyrical content and visual content that we're using for these new songs. So we thought, "Let's go out and do this 'Time Machine' tour, where we can go mine our past, and at the same time, point to the future, try some new songs, and get us in shape.

RollingStone.com: Do you think playing "Moving Pictures" in its entirety may influence the new material?

Geddy Lee: It's hard to say, I think it's going to be an interesting challenge to play some of those songs, especially "The Camera Eye", a song we haven't played in years and years. Obviously, we'll probably do a slightly newer take on it. You never know what effect bringing older songs back has on you. There are times in the past that we thought, "There is no way we can make this song work," and then you get into rehearsal, you start playing it, and you're really pleasantly surprised how much you're enjoying it. And sometimes it takes on a whole new life. I think we've stopped being kind of cynical about our past in a way, and sometimes having a second look at an older song gives it a whole new story.

Read the entire interview at RollingStone.com.