While Rush left what song to play Sunday at Canada’s Juno Awards up to their management — 1974’s “Finding My Way” — Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson had no trouble deciding what songs to rehearse first with new drummer Anika Nilles.
Lifeson tells Classic Rock magazine, “We’d prepped five songs, but I think [the first one we played] might have been ‘Limelight.’ We wouldn’t have wanted something like ‘YYZ’ as the first song, though we did run through it in those sessions. We played ‘[Spirit of] Radio’ with Anika too… We did ‘Subdivisions’… and that is a seemingly simple song for us. That’s been fascinating to watch. So you get a sense of appreciation for the way the song is, but you also get a more acute appreciation for how [our late drummer] Neil [Peart] played. Because when you see someone else trying to capture his feel, you realize what kind of player he was, and the tightness of his attitude, the firmness in attack as well.
“With ‘Tom Sawyer,’ or even ‘Limelight,’ you can’t just shuffle through those songs, you have to be attentive. And, you know, stand up straight. And that’s sort of where the feel comes from.”
Rush will start their Fifty Something tour on June 7th with the first of four shows at the Forum in Inglewood, California, where they played their last show on August 1st, 2015.
