Alex Lifeson celebrates his 66th birthday today. One of Rush’s best know songs “The Spirit of Radio” might have a different meaning than you thought. The lyrics were written in 1980 by drummer Neil Pert remembering how much he loved radio growing up, but that radio had changed. The popularity of that song pushed the album “Permanent Waves” to Rush’s first top 5 album. Guitarist Alex Lifeson thinks people didn’t all get what the song’s lyrics were about. He finds it ironic that it may have been because people misinterpreted the song’s message.
“It’s funny, we got so much airplay behind ‘The Spirit of Radio,’ because people thought it was a song about how great radio was and they never really listened to the lyrics and saw how it was a song about how great radio used to be. It was really a song lamenting the fact that we thought radio was losing its originality. In spite of that, because, I guess, it had radio in its title, they just took it at face value and the song got a tremendous amount of airplay and really helped us out a lot in a backwards sort of way.”
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