Alex Lifeson Spills New Rush Album Deets

As you'd expect, Rush is granting interviews across the country to pimp the Time Machine tour, which by all accounts is doing fantastic numbers. Many venues sold out etc. That is no small feat in this economy where the touring business is finally taking a big hit this year. Good for them.

But unlike, say, KISS - who trot out the exact same soundbites in every interview - the Rush guys will disclose little nuggets of information here and there. Maybe they are more talkative that day, maybe the interviewer is asking the right questions. But whatever the case, you gotta pay attention.

Along these lines, Alex Lifeson spilled some great details to the Allentown Pennsylvania paper The Morning Call. This Morning Call Alex Lifeson interview betrays these nuggets:

[Neil] Peart proposed the idea of doing an entire album after he saw Steely Dan on a recent tour.

"He was really impressed with the fact that they were doing different albums night to night," Lifeson says. "That's perhaps a little ambitious for us."

So Rush decided to do just one of its albums on the tour. The band had already decided to perform "The Camera Eye," the longest song on "Moving Pictures," for its current tour, so it was an easy leap to choose the album.

"We thought it would be a nice way to incorporate doing that song, a little more of a special presentation," Lifeson says. "The other stuff from that album, we've been doing for a while on and off, but it was nice to condense it all into the album and present it that way."

First of all, I love that Neil suggested doing Moving Pictures, and that he got the idea from a Steely Dan tour. So many bands live in a bubble and don't listen to anyone else's music. Rush has never been that way. Peart has said that he was a big fan of The Talking Heads and The Police in the late 70s, and that this helped move the band from epic pieces to stuff like Spirit of Radio and certainly the more ska and reggae stuff on Signals and Grace Under Pressure.

More from the article:

Lifeson says the band has six songs pretty much ready to go and three others almost done. The group plans to write at least a couple of additional songs after the tour. At this point, the CD is shaping up to be a musically varied work.

"There is the epic song, 'Clockwork Angels,' which is really taking shape. It's a multi-parted piece, very dynamic," Lifeson says. "Then there's some stuff that's very melodic and on the softer side, on acoustic, with a strong melody. So there's great diversity there. Honestly, I can't wait until we start really working on these songs. We've sort of got them to the stage where Geddy and I were happy with the arrangements and then Neil kind of comes in and starts working on his drum arrangements, and they go from there. So they're sort of in that pre-drum stage right now, and it's great to see them come to life."

Epic? Multi-parted piece? Say no MORE! The last one of those we got was The Camera Eye, which of course they are playing on this tour. Sweet!

Can't wait to hear this new album. In the meantime, here is The Camera Eye from the opening night of the tour in New Mexico:



...and the killer new song Caravan: