Monday, February 08, 2010

Rush May Return To Extended Pieces; Or, Neil Peart Sees Porcupine Tree

Not even sure what to title this post but either way it's exciting. Neil Peart was interviewed by the St Catharine's Standard and said Rush is currently starting to work on new material and the sky is the limit on what shape it may take.

Previously, it had been reported that Rush was going to possibly abandon the album format and just record and release stuff on the Web. This would allow them to do, say, a four-song project and just get it out the door.

But the article indicates that Neil saw Porcupine Tree recently and apparently saw the same set list I saw in Portland when they did their whole new CD The Incident all the way through. Neil said:

I went to see a band called Porcupine Tree not long ago. And I was talking with (singer-guitarist) Steven Wilson. They just put out a 55-minute piece. That's a finger to the whole iTunes shuffle thing, and he intended it as such. And I thought, 'Yeah, that's another way of rebelling against it -- by just saying no.' There's too much lost in giving up the integrity of an album -- what it represents to you as a musician, and as a human being, for that matter. So I like that approach. That's very possible for a band like us. So there are no limitations; we might go big or we might go small.

What is uber cool about this is that in past interviews Neil has always been the one to dump cold water on Rush doing long pieces of music again, saying they have already done that and he doesn't want to go backwards. So this could be good! Check out the whole interview here.

1 comment:

Perplexio said...

Porcupine Tree is great, maybe it took seeing another band do a longer piece of music live to make Peart realize that there's still an audience for those longer pieces that Rush used to do a lot more of.

I know Dream Theater has performed songs 25, 30, and even up to about 45 minutes long live before. If they can get away with it, Rush should certainly be able to as well.