Happy Trails And High Spirits

02/06/2003 6:00 PM, LAUNCH
Greg Reifsteck

Making 22 albums' worth of music with the same band is a cakewalk compared to putting up with doing interview after interview for album number 23. But if there is one thing that will get bassist/frontman Geddy Lee through the daunting promotion for Rush's most recent studio album, Vapor Trails, and new best-of compilation, The Spirit Of Radio: Greatest Hits (1974-1987), it is Vapor Trails' overall positivity.

"Rock music is generally a music of celebration, and it's a music that is very spirited," Lee philosophizes on the phone from New York. "The most successful rock music historically has been one that has had a lot of positive energy."

With songs like the post-9/11 call-to-order "Peaceable Kingdom" (which Lee describes as "gritty and hot, and talks about different belief systems--it's a critique in a way, but it is a prayer for the positive"), the driving "Ceiling Unlimited" (which is "trying to take out eyes from down low to up high, where all the good stuff is"), and the disc's first potent rock radio hit, "One Little Victory," Rush are looking to take their music to stratospheric heights, both lyrically and spiritually.

"After everything that we went through, we didn't want to dwell on the negative. I think it was a natural thing conceptually that the record is about renewal of spirit," says Lee.

Six years in the making--during which drummer Neal Peart suffered the tragic deaths of both his wife and daughter, while Lee busied himself with the solo project My Favorite Headache--the trio's Trails gives off a luster of sonic intensity, with nary an artificial sound in sight. Effects and keyboards have been present in Rush's own brand of power-rock as far back as their last commentary on civilization and society, the 1976 classic 2112, but through the years, fans accustomed to the more stripped-down sound of Hemispheres and Fly By Night were sometimes alienated by the technology on Signals and Test For Echo.

With Vapor Trails, however, Lee says, "We wanted to approach this in a three-piece format again. Let's try to stick to basic guitars, drums, bass--and if we cannot resist the addition of other textures and melodies, let's try to do it with voices and guitars, as opposed to using keyboards. We were influenced by what we heard on our last live album, Different Stages. Listening to some of our early stuff from 1978 reminded us of how nice it can be when you have a simple architecture of bass, drums, and guitar. Your music can still be rich and full of different kinds of musical passages, but let's let the job of those original instruments play the main role. We had a great desire to make some sort of statement of how passionate we feel to make music again together."

As passionate as they were, Lee admits that the band had to "warm up for a little while. It was strange, and we had to feel our way. We were out of touch, musically speaking, but personally, we were closer than ever before.

"We didn't know what was going to come out, and we don't really know what we're going to do until we start playing together," he continues. "So there is really no way of pre-designing a Rush album. It's very much an accidental and spontaneous process." Thank heaven for such happy accidents.