Neil Peart Waxes on the Future of Rush

What to write? What to write? Another Rush post? Seems like there are lots of opportunities to put up little things about Rush these days. I usually let them pass because there are better sites for that – like RushIsABand.com.

But every month, Neil Peart posts a usually-lengthy entry on his Web site that either chronicles a motorcycle trek, a bird-watching episode and sometimes items about drumming. This month, he got way into the drumming again, and it’s worth a read if you are a Peart fan.

One part of his post struck me as interesting enough to repeat here. Peart said that soon he would be getting together with Alex and Geddy to talk about what they are going to do next as a band. He said that none of them have any idea of what lies next but that they have been paying attention to the changing landscape of the music business and may decide to go very non-conventional moving forward.

They only have one album left on their deal with Atlantic (he didn’t say this, but it is true), so after that is done, they can pretty much do whatever they want, business-wise. Interesting possibilities. Here is some of what I am talking about:

... In this autumn of 2009, the three of us are poised on another kind of "reinvention." We have agreed to meet in Los Angeles in November, and discuss our future. ... these are parlous times in the music business, so our time-honored pattern of touring, recording, and touring is no longer the obvious way to do things. ... Because of that reality, record company advances that used to pay for album projects are a thing of the past, so if that was what we wanted to do, we'd be on our own. ... To this point, the three of us haven't even discussed what we might discuss, so to speak-so our ideas and shared enthusiasm for the entity of Rush will be fresh, spontaneous, and quite likely exciting. For myself, I'm open to anything we can all agree on (I've pointed out before that in a three-piece band, we need consensus, not democracy-it's no good having one outvoted and unhappy member). My favorite group activity is always songwriting and recording, and I've got some lyrical ideas and those new drumming frontiers to explore. However, those rhythmic concepts would also be inspiring for a new drum solo, if we decided to do a tour of some kind, maybe with an orchestra. We could write and record just a few songs, and release them some way. Or there were a couple of film-and-music projects we had discussed in the past. In any case, there are enough possibilities for future collaboration, and I am curious to see what we'll come up with.

Maybe they could just do house concerts and start in my basement. There’s an idea to discuss!