“That song, to me, described what me and my friends could relate to,” says Lee. “Growing up in the suburbs, feeling this disconnect with urban life — and I guess it’s because so much of North American life was constructed that way, during the period we were growing up and afterward. As we toured around, especially in America, we saw how life kind of ran away from the downtown areas into the suburbs, so I imagine the disconnect was something that rang true with a lot of people.”
The thematic arc of their music is not unlike the painful transition from adolescence to adulthood. In the beginning, there is pure aggression; then there’s the world of fantasy and illusion; then, eventually, the real world and its issues start to break down the wall of fantasy. Next thing you know, you’re an adult. “You don’t feel like a citizen when you’re in a young rock band, it’s all about the rock experience — and if you have the good fortune to still be writing songs 30 years later when you’re an adult, the things you think about and the things that affect you obviously show up in the music and the lyrics. It’s a unique opportunity to still be writing all these years later, and I think unlike a lot of bands who are kind of trading on their past, we’re trying hard not to.”
That means we shouldn’t be holding our collective breath for Rush to revisit prog’s salad days and write more side-long 20-minute epics à la “2112” and “The Necromancer.” “You know, we got really bored with that [writing long pieces] — it’s a limitation to take 30 minutes and dedicate it to one idea, you know, divide that up into six different ideas, six different musical adventures. I won’t say it hasn’t crossed our mind, but we don’t want to do it as a premeditated construct, as a thing to do because people expect us to do it.”
In that sense, Rush as an entity is more than a rock band, almost a democratic ideal: three members working together to make music that is the melodramatic opposite of the usual rock-and-roll recipe of rebellion and hostility. “It’s nice — we don’t always agree, but we are able to, for some reason, be ridiculously considerate of each other. I don’t know, maybe it’s because our moms brought us up to be nice boys. It’s the reason we’ve been able to keep it together, to be, you know, the last working democracy.”
RUSH | Comcast Center, 885 South Main St, Mansfield | June 15 at 6:30 pm | $28-$110 | 508.339.2331 orwww.livenation.com
