Grace Under Pressure:
The Album Cover
From "Success Under Pressure": Tying in with the Lp title, the inner sleeve depicted an egg, held within the menacing jaws of a metal C-clamp. "The important thing is not to crack," said Neil to one reporter. Once again, the front cover artwork was designed by Hugh Syme, but the back sleeve photograph was taken by the 75- year old internationally renowned portrait lensman, Yousuf Karsh. The photo session took place in an Ottawa hotel room and, despite Karsh's impressive track record with royalty, presidents, astronauts and film stars, the end result was generally considered an extremely unflattering photograph of the band. However, Geddy told a critic from the 'St. Paul Pioneer Press': "I think the picture brings out our personalities quite nicely. But it also looks like a bar mitzvah photo, doesn't it?"

The Album
Neil Peart's Pressure Release

Neil Peart (1984): "Our records tend to follow in cycles, some of them exploratory and experimental, others more cohesive and definitive. I think that this one, like 'Moving Pictures', 'Hemispheres' or '2112' before it, is a definitive one of its type. Really, it defines its type. An indefinable thread, both musical and conceptual, emerges in a natural way and links the diverse influences and approaches into an overall integrity."

Geddy Lee reflects back on Grace Under Pressure:

Have you ever been unhappy with an album immediately after recording it?

Geddy Lee (Bass Player magazine, 1993): "Yes -- I wasn't happy with 'Grace Under Pressure'. But it was a no-win situation in that case because that album was extremely difficult to make. We went through tremendous turmoil and pressure making it, and I don't think I could have liked it given the circumstances. As soon as the record was done, I wanted to get away from it -- and I've rarely listened to it since, because it's attached to too many difficult memories."

Distant Early Warning
This song was also released as a single.

What is the main theme behind Distant Early Warning?

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): The main theme of the song is a series of things, but that's certainly one of the idea[s] (our very tense world situation), and living in the, living in the modern world basically in all of its manifestations in terms of the distance from us of uh, the threat of superpowers and the, uh, the nuclear annihilation and all of that stuff, and these giant missiles pointed at each other across the ocean. There's all of that, but that tends to have a little bit of distance from people's lives, but at the same time I think it is omnipresent, you know, I think that threat does loom somewhere in everyone's subconscious, perhaps. And then it deals with the closer things in terms of relationships and how to keep a relationship in such a swift-moving world, and it has something to do with our particular lives, dealing with revolving doors, going in and out, but also I think that's generally true with people in the modern world where, uh, things for a lot of people are very difficult, and consequently, work and the mundane concerns of life tend to take precedence over the important values of relationships and of the larger world and the world of the abstract as opposed to the concrete, and dealing with all of those things with grace. [more of the song is played] And when I see a little bit of grace in someone's life. like when you drive past a horrible tenement building and you see these wonderful pink flamingos on the balcony up there, or something like, some little aspect of humanity that strikes you as a beautiful resistance if you like.

Who was Absalom?

Teri Piatt (tpiatt@lazy.helios.nd.edu): He was a character from the Bible, son of King David (the one who killed Goliath). He killed his half-brother for raping their half-sister. Then, he tried to over-throw David and get the throne. A battle resulted, and (against David's wishes) Absalom was killed by King David's Mighty Men, when his hair was caught in a tree and suspended him above the ground. David grieved for his son by lamenting, "Absalom, Absalom, my son." I have thought about this story's connection quite a bit. Perhaps it is about David, and how he had the "weight of the world" on his shoulders and he was worrying about Absalom.

Neil Peart: "Before I ever knew who or what Absalom was, I always loved the sound of it. I had thought perhaps it was an ancient prayer or something. There is a book by William Faulkner called Absalom, Absalom, which, again, I loved the sound of. I wanted to put it in the song, as a play on words with 'absolute' and 'obsolete,' but I thought I'd better find out for sure what it meant. So I called my wife and asked her to look it up in the encyclopedia. When I learned the real story, and its Biblical roots, I decided that it was still appropriate, as it was the ultimate expression of compassion, which is what the song was really about. 'Absalom, Absalom. My son, my son. Would God I had died for thee.' (Now don't anyone go reading any religion into that!)"

Who is the boy in the "Distant Early Warning" video?

From the Rush FAQ: He is Geddy's son, Julian.

Afterimage
Is "Afterimage" about anybody in particular?

The song is about Robbie Whelan, a good friend of the band who died in a car accident. He has the "Right Field" credit in the Signals liner notes.

Red Sector A
Neil Peart on the song:

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): I was moved to write it by the, I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Dachau and all of that, and this person, she was a young girl, like thirteen years old when she was sent into it, and lived in it for a few years, and then, uh, through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that though all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds, they just never, ever wanted to be the ones who were shot, you know, they were always the unlucky ones, which was an important thing that I wanted to bring out. And also, what I learned from the first person nonfiction accounts that I read was that these people would keep their little rituals of their religion, and whatever, and if it was supposed to be a fasting day, even if they were starving to death, they would turn down their little bit of bread and their little bit of gruel, because this was a fasting day, and they had to hold on to something, some essence of normality, you know, that was important. And that moved me, you know. That's, that's intense.

I wanted to give it more of a timeless atmosphere too, because it's happened, of course, in more than one time and by more than one race of people. It happened in this very country in which we sit, it happened, you know, the British did it, no one can set themselves above that, slavery rather involved how many countless countries in terms of the commerce of it all, and people shipping them around like animals and all of that. And no one can set themselves above that in a racial or nationalistic way. So I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving. You know, the people liberating them and themselves were the only surviving people in the world, and it sounds a bit melodramatic put into a song I realize, but the point is that it's true, so, you know, I didn't feel like I needed to avoid it as being over-dramatic, because, you know, I heard of it and read of it in more than one account.

What is "Red Sector A" about?

Red Sector A is the area the band watched a shuttle launch from.

On the other hand ...

Neil Peart (Rush Backstage Club newsletter, July 1985): "It is one of the 'grace under pressure' themes which captured my imagination on the last album, and is not meant to portray a specific human atrocity, although many of the historical accounts which inspired it were of course set in World War II. There have been many periods of slavery and mass imprisonment in the world and also many fictional accounts of the future. I was thinking of all these things, and wanted to try to express something timeless enough to encompass them all."

Geddy talks about the song live:

Geddy Lee (Bass Player magazine, 1987): "When we play a song like "Red Sector A" live, MIDI enables me to use the bass arpeggiator part, and send it to more than one instrument. Then I can get a really nice bass sound triggered by the arpeggiator that keeps the bottom end rolling and feeling good. That song sounds better live than it ever did on record, just because the technology has allowed me to get better sounds. That's another reason for doing this up-and-coming live album. I think some of the versions that we'll be putting on this live album are better than the original versions.

The Enemy Within
Neil Peart on the song:

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): It's part one of a trilogy but it's the last one to appear. The last three albums have each contained a part of that trilogy, and I started thinking about them all at the same time, but they appear in the order in which they were easiest to grasp. In other words, "Witch Hunt" was the first one, dealt with that mentality of mob rule, and what happens to a bunch of people when they come together and they're afraid, and they go out and do something really stupid and really horrible. That was easy to grasp, and you see plenty of examples of that in real life as well as in fiction and in films of course, too. So that was easy to deal with. The second one was "The Weapon," and it was dealing with how people use your fears against you, as a weapon, and that took a little longer to come to grips with, but eventually I got my thinking straightened out and the images that I wanted to use, and collected them all up, and it came out. And then finally, "The Enemy Within" was more difficult, because I wanted to look at how it affects me, but it was more than about me. I don't like to be introspective as a rule. I think I'm gonna set that down as my first rule, as "never be introspective!" But, uh, I wanted to, at the same time I wanted to write about myself in a universal kind of way, I want to find things in myself that I think apply.

The Body Electric
The song was inspired by the movie "THX 1138", which some of you movie buffs know was George Lucas' first big film.

Neil Peart ("Off The Record", 1984): "The Body Electric on this album is a little piece of, sort of science fiction frippery..."

Red Lenses
red lenses - a tribute to some of Neil's favorite writers

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): In a deeper level, without wanting to get too profound about it, but it's a style of writing which I've been wanting to get towards, which I've read with John Dos Passos is a prose writer who exemplifies it, T.S. Eliot is a poet who exemplifies it, where they throw so much at you, so many images and so many pictures that are all individually beautiful, not necessarily interconnecting, but they just come at you and they come at you, and all the way through it your head is spinning, and you think, "oh, I'm not understanding this, why am I not understanding this, am I stupid?" And then at the end of it, you sort of put it aside and after the dizziness subsides, you're left with something. You're left with something beautiful. And when one will mention that book to you or that poem to you that story to you, then this beautiful thing, indescribable, intangible, image which you have drawn out of all that comes into your mind. So I just, just wanted to get towards that style of writing where its carefully refined, each little image is worked out so that on its own its something, but all together its a little bit obscure and a little bit vague, so you almost seem to be saying nothing, but in fact you're saying, you know, a great many things.

This was probably the hardest song I have ever worked on, it just, in spite of the pleasure it gave me and how much I enjoyed doing it, it went through so many rewrites and changed its title so many times, everything about it just went through constant refinement, each little image was juggled around and I just fought for the right words to put each little phrase together and to make it sound exactly right to me, so that it sounded a little bit nonsensical. I wanted to get that kind of Jabberwocky, uh, word games thing happening with it and also there's little things going on that your mind sort of catches without identifying, like a lot of poetic devices. You take the, uh, number of words that sound the same or start with the same letter or whatever, you just certainly don't start in the middle of it and go, "oh, that's alliteration!" But those words fall upon your ear in a melodious way, or if you're reading them they, they run through your mind in a rhythmic and attractive way.

Geddy talks about the song

"red lenses" [Grace Under Pressure] has a really different feel for a Rush song, more of a groove. Was it done in a different way?

Geddy Lee (Guitar Player, April 1986): It's a different kind of song. It was the last thing we wrote for Grace Under Pressure. Usually the last track we write on each record is different from everything else. It's probably a reaction against working so hard, and all of a sudden you want to do something different to round-out the record, give it some more variety. I like it a lot because it is different, but it's very indulgent. I'm always surprised when people like those tracks. You can understand if a musician gets into it, but you don't think the general public will.

Between The Wheels
Neil on the song:

Neil Peart (Jim Ladd "Innerview", 1984): That was another real complicated one to work on. That one came musically first, uh, when we first went up to northern Ontario to start rehearsing. The first night we get together, we usually have some new technical toys to play with, and we sort of get acquainted again and talk about what we've been doing if we haven't seen each other for a couple of weeks, and just sort of casually sit down and, and work at our instruments and once everybody's sort of happening, in an accidental almost way, things start to drift together. You know, in the same way that it sometimes happens in sound check during the afternoon, where, uh, before we get down to the serious business, we'll just be checking out our things and somebody will start playing and someone else will join in, and something happens. And on that particular night, that song happened, but not just one part of it, the three movements of it, without talking about them, it was quite astonishing, really, that we just started playing with this little piece of music, and a modulation appeared. Somebody came up with a change, and the others heard it, and the next time it came around, we followed it, and we started playing that. By the next time we were going around with this little sequence of ideas, someone got brave and introduced a third idea. Well, everyone goes, "Oh, okay!" and the next time everyone jumps on it. So, we're playing around this circuit of three little patterns which became the verse to the song, the bridge of the song, and then the chorus of the song.

The idea of "Between The Wheels," it was really kind of the opposite of "The Digital Man," in a way. In the case where, the Digital Man, the character is running faster than life, you know, in the fast lane and all of that, just moving faster than, than real time. And then there's the other side of it, where a person is in harmony with time and their life moves along, well, that's very rare. The opposite of that is the people for whole life goes faster than they do, you know. That idea of being in the back water, or watching the action go by, or whatever, to where, the wheels of time, for instance that analogy, some people it picks them up and carries them forward, you know, and it seems to work for them as being mobile wheels. And other people in a real sense without being too melodramatic, are crushed by those wheels. You know, the wheels of change or time or circumstances or history or whatever just roll right over them, you know, obliterate them. [unintelligible comment from JL] Yeah, so there's those two extremes of it, but in the middle, there are the people who are untouched by it, and the wheels of time just roll right past them, and that's what I was getting at with "Between The Wheels" was the fact that these people were neither hurt nor helped by it, but it just rolled, they were observers, sort of, it just rolled right by them and they were in a very sedentary position.

Power Windows:
The Big Money
Geddy Lee on the song:

That's an interesting sequence at the beginning of "Big Money", do you do programming? Geddy Lee (Bass Player, 1987): "Usually I'll do a basic sequence as a direction of a part, and then when (keyboardist) Andy Richards comes in the studio he listens to what I've done. If he can improve on it, he has full license to go ahead. And the nice thing about working with him is he's very open to everybody's ideas. I can think up an idea that I don't have the technical ability to play, but he does, and he'll take that idea even farther than I imagined it. That's a real bonus for me."

Alex on the song:

Are there any non-guitar sounds on the Power Windows album that listeners might mistake for guitar?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): Yeah. There are a couple during the first verse of "Big Money." It sounds like they're played with a vibrato arm and a really gritty sort of tone. And that's actually Geddy playing the PPG synthesizer with a guitar sound sampled into it.

Grand Designs
Grand Designs" [from 'Power Windows'] features a great drum part by Neil. Some good bassists might be thrown off by that kind of part.

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, 1987): "I don't remember any difficulty with that song, as a matter of fact. One of the best things about playing with the same person for a very long time is you have this kind of telepathic connection in a way. You know each other so well stylistically that there's a whole range of probabilities that you have in common. So if I hear him going in a direction or he hears me going in a direction, we can shift to that direction. I think we've figured out a way to complement each other so that it's comfortable. It's something that comes with time and work. And knowing when to simplify and when not to simplify. Sometimes when a bass player is playing with a rhythmically difficult drum part, that's the time to simplify, help the part cruise by playing more consistently. That can help knit the parts together. At the same time, if there's another drum part coming up where he's going to be more solid and fundamental, that will enable the bass to stretch out a bit and get more active. So it's give and take."

Are there many guitar tracks in "Grand Designs"?

Geddy Lee (Guitar Player, April 1986): "I don't think that there are. Most of "Grand Designs" is one guitar that's not even doubled. We may have put it through an AMS [digital processor] at about 40 milliseconds and split it left and right. I know we did that with the bouncing echoes in the first verse, where the main guitar is in the middle and the harmonic line is on the outside. That one's fairly straightforward, except for the acoustic guitars in the second chorus."

Alex talks about his use of whammy in the song

Parts of "Grand Designs" almost sound like slide guitar.

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): "Yeah. It's whammy. I was very much influenced by Allan Holdsworth a number of years ago, the way he uses the whammy bar to slur notes and move around. That got me interested in using one and trying to develop a style with one. So many people use it now that it's not that unique, and actually I've started to move away from it a bit. I've gotten a bit lazy with my natural vibrato since I've been relying a lot more on the whammy bar. It's time for a change."

Manhattan Project
Geddy on the song/sampling:

Geddy Lee (Guitar Player, April 1986): Sampling isn't perfect enough so that you can make it completely realistic-- you still can't get the feel, because digital recording of a sound gives every note pretty well the same value, which you never do when you're playing a lick. On "Manhattan Project" [Power Windows], Andy played sort of a fretless-sounding bass line on a Roland JP-8 keyboard synthesizer. It sounded great, so to do it live, we sampled that JP-8 sound into my Emulators. So it worked, but it didn't work at the same time. I use it live and it sounds okay, but every slide has exactly the same value, which you would never want. When you play a fretless part, you slide through some notes and pass through others at a different rate. You can't really do that with a stored sound, unless you have a complex sampling situation where you sample each note differently. So, it has its drawbacks, fortunately for us bass players [laughs].

Marathon
What was Marathon about?

Neil Peart (Canadian Composer, April 1986): Marathon "..is about the triumph of time and a kind of message to myself (because I think life is too short for all the things that I want to do), there's a self-admonition saying that life is long enough. You can do a lot -- just don't burn yourself out too fast trying to do everything at once.

"Marathon is a song about individual goals and trying to achieve them. And it's also about the old Chinese proverb: 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.'"

Alex on the difficulty of recording "Marathon"

Were any of the Power Windows guitar tracks especially difficult to cut?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): It's funny. There's always one song that you're terrified of doing. You think it's going to be really tough, and "Marathon" was the one. We wrote it and thought, "This song is going to be like pulling teeth once we get in the studio." Of course, we get into the studio and it's a breeze. And a song like "Emotion Detector," which we thought would be a breeze, was the killer. It was very, very difficult to get the mood right. I'm still not really sold on that song. It never ended up sounding the way I had hoped it would. But the "Marathon" solo was probably the easiest of all the solos to do.

Territories
Neil talks about Territories:

Neil Peart (Canadian Composer, April 1986): "I think what China had to offer, in terms of its impact on the world, I had already taken advantage of in a song like 'Territories' for instance. The song was directly influence by the Chinese attitude toward themselves." "The title comes from an area around Hong Kong called The New Territories. I was struck by the sound of that word, and the territorial instinct. And what with the Northwest Territories being part of Canada, it was just the right sort of word to describe what I was after."

"Also it had the right poetic sound and visual contact. That's important to me in a title. So that was the essence of it."

"As for the opening line about the Middle Kingdom -- that's still what China calls itself today. The reason for the Middle Kingdom is because it's a middle between Heaven and Earth. In other words, it's slightly below Heaven -- but still above everybody on Earth.

Geddy talks about the song:

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, 1987): Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're playing a bass guitar or a keyboard. On the verse of "Territories" [from 'Power Windows'] there's a real droning type of bass part. Then, on the B part, you get into a more staccato kind of sound. "Whenever you hear that low bottom end that drones underneath, it's usually my Moog pedals. I've been using those for years and they're really great when I have to go to keyboards and sustain the bottom end. Because they have an unobtrusive bass that doesn't phase."

Alex on the tone of the song

What causes the Far Eastern tone in the opening of "Territories"?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): "That's just the Ibanez HD-1000 Harmonics/Delay set at an octave above with a little bit of modulation. The harmonics level is set at about 70%, the direct is set at the full 100%, and I was on the middle pickup on the black Strat. I used left-hand finger-pulls. After that, it switches to a much crisper tone, and to do that in concert, I just switch to the back pickup."

Middletown Dreams
Neil analyzes and discusses the song and meanings:

Neil Peart (Canadian Composer, April 1986): "I used the exact thing which 'Territories' warns against as a device in 'Middletown'. I chose 'Middletown' because there is a Middletown in almost every state in the U.S. It comes from people identifying with a strong sense of neighborhood. It's a way of looking at the world with the eyeglass in reverse."

"I spent my days-off cycling around the countryside in the U.S., looking at these little towns and getting a new appreciation of them. When you pass through them at 15 miles per hour, you see them a little differently. So I was looking at these places and kind of looking at the people in them -- fantasizing, perhaps romanticizing, a little about their lives. I guess I was even getting a little literary in imagining the present, past, and future of these men, women, and children. There was that romantic way of looking at each small town."

"But also each of the characters in that song is drawn from real life or specific literary examples. The first character as based on a writer called Sherwood Anderson. Late in his life, Anderson literally walked down the railroad tracks out of a small town and went to Chicago in the early 1900's to become a very important writer of his generation. That's an example of a middle-aged man who may have been perceived by his neighbors, and by an objective onlooker, to have sort of finished his life and he could have stagnated in his little town. But he wasn't finished in his own mind. He had this big dream, and it was never too late for him, so he walked off and he did it."

"The painter Paul Gauguin is another example of a person who, late in life, just walked out of his environment and went away. He too became important and influencial. He is the influence for the woman character of song."

"The second verse about the young boy wanting to run away and become a musician is a bit autobiographical. But it also reflects the backgrounds of most of the successful musicians I know, many of whom came from very unlikely backgrounds. Most of them had this dream that other people secretly smiled at, or openly laughed at, and they just went out and made it happen."

A good marriage between lyrics and music:

Do you feel that your best lyrics have become your best songs?

Neil Peart (Guitar for the Practicing Musician, 1986): "No, not always. It's weird how it goes. There's so much chemistry involved and there's so many intangible things that happen. There are ones where the music has been better than the lyrics or the lyrics better than the music. I think 'Middletown Dreams' is a good marriage of lyrics and music. 'Mystic Rhythms' is another one."

Alex on Middletown Dreams

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): "The original guitar part was laid down, and then Ged redid his bass. Because he had some time to spend, he changed some of the bass patterns. Then the keyboards came on, and suddenly the mood of the song was totally different. So, it was a bit of experimenting when it came to putting down the basic tracks for the guitar. And that one took a couple of rewrites. I'd do something, come back the next day, and they'd say, 'You know, as the night went along, we got a little bit better towards the end there. Why don't we go back to the beginning and look at the guitar part and maybe think about rewriting it?' This was constantly happening."

Emotion Detector
Alex on "Emotion Detector"

Were any of the Power Windows guitar tracks especially difficult to cut?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, April 1986): It's funny. There's always one song that you're terrified of doing. You think it's going to be really tough, and "Marathon" was the one. We wrote it and thought, "This song is going to be like pulling teeth once we get in the studio." Of course, we get into the studio and it's a breeze. And a song like "Emotion Detector," which we thought would be a breeze, was the killer. It was very, very difficult to get the mood right. I'm still not really sold on that song. It never ended up sounding the way I had hoped it would.

Were any of the Power Windows solos played in one pass?

I don't thinks so. Half of "Emotion Detector" was done in one pass. Actually,that song had a whole different solo that took quite a bit of work. We left it, went ahead with some other parts, lived with it for four or five days, and Neil didn't feel quite right about it. He didn't think that it made the proper kind of statement to the song, so we re-examined it and I gave it another whirl. That was tough. It's one thing to rewrite a rhythm guitar part--you've got stuff to lock onto. But it was so hard to divorce what had been in my head as a solo for three months and come up with something that was a totally different feel. But I am satisfied with the results.

Mystic Rhythms
A good marriage between lyrics and music:

Do you feel that your best lyrics have become your best songs?

Neil Peart (Guitar for the Practicing Musician, 1986): "No, not always. It's weird how it goes. There's so much chemistry involved and there's so many intangible things that happen. There are ones where the music has been better than the lyrics or the lyrics better than the music. I think 'Middletown Dreams' is a good marriage of lyrics and music. 'Mystic Rhythms' is another one."

Geddy on fading out songs

Do you plan in advance for songs to fade out?

Geddy Lee (Guitar Player, April 1986): Sometimes. Sometimes we're not sure, so we ride out for a long time, and then end it. We have the option. Invariably, every time we decide we're going to fade out, we start getting into the fade and everyone loosens up and the track starts getting better. That happened with "Mystic Rhythms" [Power Windows]; the fade-out is about a minute long because we liked every little nuance. The end of "Grand Designs" [Power Windows] is also like that. There are about seven phrases, and they're all different. None of that was planned; Neil was doing the drum track, and at the end, the sequencers were going and he just kept punching-in and going, basically flailing and hacking through it. Everybody loved it, so we decided to keep it in. Then we had to learn to play it onstage.

Hold Your Fire:
The Album Cover
Geddy Lee ("Rockline", Oct 5 1987): "It's so difficult to describe the album cover because you want to leave a little bit of mystery, and you want it to be interpreted by the person who is holding the thing in front of them. So I'm really not going to say too much about what the cover says to me, but it's nothing extremely mystical or anything. It has nothing to do with brown rice."

Geddy Lee (Only Music, December 1987): "It's an abstraction that can be taken in so many different ways. Basically, you get a good feeling about the artwork, there's something that clicks about it. The three balls, geometrically and physically create a tension in the way they're suspended. They relate to the balls of fire, as it relates to holding your creative fires. It's all a play on those thoughts and everything associated with them. Sure, you can look at it as three people, three balls, but it's all that and more."

Force Ten
Geddy on the collaboration with Pye Dubois writing "Force Ten":

Geddy Lee ("Rockline", Oct 5 1987): "It was more or less an afterthought in the writing stage. We took two months to do all of our writing and preproduction, you know, preparation for the making of the record, and we had nine songs, and we had about a day and a half left of time booked before we were supposed to leave and get ready to make the record. And our producer and all of us were pushing for ten tracks on the album, and some lyrics had been submitted to us by a friend of ours, Pye Dubois, who co-wrote 'Tom Sawyer' with us in years gone by. And Neil was able to put some of his own thoughts to one of the songs that he had and present it to us in the morning of the last day that we were there, and we loved the results, so we got together and brainstormed for about 2 or 3 hours, and we had Force Ten."

The writing process behind "Force Ten":

From Only Music, December 1987: Force Ten was the first single released from Hold Your Fire, and was ironically the last song written on the Album. Pye co-wrote the lyrics with Neil. "He played with it a bit until he was happy with the result and showed it to us. At the time we had nine songs and wanted to get ten tracks on the record. Peter felt we really need one more rock song, so when these lyrics came by, we were excited about it."

"We wrote 'Force Ten' one afternoon in three hours," says Lee. "Those songs to me are always my favorite because they are spontaneous and fresh. It gives the album more variety and balance."

Neil Peart (1988): "The song expresses ways to face barriers and urges people not to be afraid of failure - one of our basic temperamental traits."

Geddy on the bass sound in Force Ten:

On "Force Ten" [from Hold Your Fire] you do some chordal stuff on bass. What were you thinking of then? It really pushes the tune ahead.

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, Nov/Dec 1988): "Before I had a visit from Jeff Berlin, who's a friend, on the tour I had the opportunity to watch him goofing around backstage with a bass, and was just amazed at his knowledge of bass chords. That's something I had never really exploited in my playing, so he inspired me to play around more with it. He probably doesn't know it, and would be embarrassed to hear it. I ended up using bass chords on "Force Ten" and "Turn The Page". Not so much in the sense of strumming them as using my thumb more, almost like a fingerpicking style of playing, which is something that I'm still working on. Just plucking with my thumb and going back and forth between the thumb and the first two fingers and pulling. Almost like a snapping technique. It's opened up a bit more range for me. There's more melodic possibilities and rhythmic possibilities too, which is an important role for the bass player. If you can establish not only a melody but a rhythmic feel, that's an extra tool."

Alex on the jack hammer:

Alex Lifeson (Guitar magazine, August 1988): "For some of the things Andy Richards, a keyboard player who does some session work and helps with programming and playing, will come up with these ridiculous like with "Force Ten" as an example. He had a sample of a jack hammer and it was really effective for the song. It's fun to intro things a little differently, a little bent."

Time Stand Still
Aimee Mann in the song:

How did Aimee Mann ('til Tuesday) come to sing on this song?

Geddy Lee (1988): "We knew that the part she sings on was a feminine part. We didn't want to use a keyboard or have Alex or myself sing it, so we started looking for a female singer. It's a very attractive opportunity for us to work with a female singer. We just looked until we found a voice, that was suitable. In listening to Aimee's last record, we loved the way she sang, so we just asked her."

The first song Neil wrote:

Neil Peart (1988): "My first idea was to write about time and the first song I wrote was 'Time Stand Still'. But the more I thought about it and played around with the ideas, the more expanded idea of temperamental barriers took shape. 'Time Stand Still' applies to that concept in that it deals with the attitude of enjoying life and not letting it whisk by without appreciating it."

Open Secrets
Behind "Open Secrets":

"Open Secrets" stemmed from a conversation between Peart and Lee about people they knew and how they went through life without properly addressing problems that were affecting them.

Neil Peart (1988): "Quite a lot of my ideas come from having conversations with other people. I take their observations and viewpoints and personalize them. Unfortunately a lot of people think these songs are personal statements. I don't want that to happen because it would seem I'm unburdening myself and that would be tiresome."

Geddy on the song:

At the end of "Open Secrets" [from Hold Your Fire] it sounds like you guys are jamming, almost an improvised thing.

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, Nov/Dec 1988): "It sort of was. That song went through a lot of changes, and by the end of it, we had established this bass riff near the top of it. At the end we got into this groove when we were in the demo stage that we knew would be fun. So when Neil locked into that groove and went with it, he felt so good that we just let him go. And I just jammed to what he already put down."

Alex on the solo in the song:

What is your attitude about solos? Do yours have anything to do with lyric or the melody?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar magazine, August 1988): "It's more the musicality of the song than the lyrical content. For the solo I think it's the mood that's created by the music. I suppose in a way that makes it attached to the lyrics. But it's more the music that provides the trigger for what the solo does. If it's a dark, melancholy sound to that particular song, then the solo will reflect that. An example is "Open Secrets." It has that lonely mood to it from a musical point of view. I thinkthe solo in that song reflects that wailing loneliness. Something like "Turn the Page" is much more manic and crazy.

Do you have a favorite track on the record for vision versus execution?

"Probably "Mission" and "Open Secrets." "Mission" came out a lot better than I thought it would. It had gone through quite a few changes since its inception and it ended up being a much better song than it started out."

Prime Mover
Geddy Lee talks about how they design guitar solos:

During "Prime Mover" [from Hold Your Fire] you really dig into your part during the guitar solos. I read how you guys compose the guitar solos as a group. Do you have to wait until the solo is composed before you come up with your parts?

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, Nov/Dec 1988): "We obviously have a chordal structure, and a melodic fix or picture of what the part's going to be. Usually I put it down, and between Neil and myself, we get little rhythm patterns going. I play around with the melody, and depending on what the tone center is and what the chord structures are in that area, I just write my part. Then Alex plays different solos around what Neil and I have already put down. He's quite content to work with what we've put down, and in most parts he's around through every stage anyway, so he's quite aware of the direction it's going in. He'll go down and wail, and a lot of times he will surprise us. It's a totally different direction than we had expected it, but it's always within the melodic structure that exists."

Second Nature
Neil on the message of "Second Nature":

From 1988: "Second Nature" is conciliatory in its message: If we can't reach perfection in this world then let's at least settle for some degree of improvement. "Sometimes we have to accept something less than total victory," notes Peart. "It's like the difference between compromise and balance. The politician who campaigns for clean air but doesn't want to close down the stinking factory in his area because thousands of people will lose their jobs. My viewpoint is that I'll take as much as I can without hurting other people."

Lock And Key
From 1988: According to Geddy Lee, the music was written simultaneously with the lyrics and fit together like a glove without any forethought.

Geddy Lee on the bass sounds in the song:

There's one section on "Lock And Key" where you get a good trebly effect. I know you used Rickenbackers in the past,and that sound reminds me of it.

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, Nov/Dec 1988): "You can get that sound out of most basses I think, but a Rickenbacker has a particular kind of top end, and bottom end as well. It has a particular kind of classic twang to it. I found that I wanted to get a little more subtlety in the sound, and I couldn't quite get it out of the Rick. I wanted to change the top end a little bit, get a little different shaped bottom end. Then I moved to a Steinberger, which really gave me a totally different sound. The top end didn't range as high and twangy, and the bottom end was quite a different shade. I liked it a lot, and used it onstage, and on the Grace Under Pressure album. But on Power Windows I got introduced to the Wal bass, made by a small company in England. Our producer, Peter Collins, had one and suggested I try it out. I used that bass on Hold Your Fire, and I'm very pleased with the results and its flexibility. I use a 4-string most of the time, but on "Lock And Key" it was a 5-string they made with an extra low "B". I find that low string really means more today, because we're living in the world of synthesizers that go lower than basses ever went before."

Mission
Geddy on the meaning behind Mission:

Geddy Lee (1988): "Mission," one of the strongest cuts on the new album, has an underlying philosophy behind it. "It basically grew out of a conversation Neil and I had about the kind of people we consider ourselves to be, people who always knew what they wanted to do in their lives and always had this ambition and desire, but couldn't make a choice as to what to do. It was always very clear that we had to do what we do - whether we were a success or a failure - we knew we would always play music in some way. 'Mission' also looks sadly at the people who have never really been sure what they should be doing and have never had a clearcut idea where to put their creative ability to [reach] a final, ultimate conclusion," notes Lee.

Alex on his favorite songs from Hold Your Fire:

Do you have a favorite track on the record for vision versus execution?

Alex Lifeson (Guitar magazine, 1988): "Probably "Mission" and "Open Secrets." "Mission" came out a lot better than I thought it would. It had gone through quite a few changes since its inception and it ended up being a much better song than it started out."

Turn The Page
Geddy talks about playing the song live:

Has singing and playing at the same time ever been a problem for you?

Geddy Lee (Bass Player, Nov/Dec 1988): "Oh sure. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do. You have to put a lot of hours into practice. As a matter of fact, on this tour I had a major problem with "Turn The Page". It's a very busy bass part, and the vocal part doesn't really relate to it very much. Eventually I got it, but it took a lot of practice. You can do those things, but you have to practice them a lot. You have to split yourself, as they say. Split your hands. Split yourself in two really, and let your hands do something, and let your voice do the other."

Alex on the solo in the song:

What is your attitude about solos? Do yours have anything to do with lyric or the melody? Alex Lifeson (Guitar magazine, August 1988): "It's more the musicality of the song than the lyrical content. For the solo I think it's the mood that's created by the music. I suppose in a way that makes it attached to the lyrics. But it's more the music that provides the trigger for what the solo does. If it's a dark, melancholy sound to that particular song, then the solo will reflect that. An example is "Open Secrets." It has that lonely mood to it from a musical point of view. I thinkthe solo in that song reflects that wailing loneliness. Something like "Turn the Page" is much more manic and crazy."

So the solos are actually compositions?

"Yeah, except for "Turn the Page." I had a rough idea for that, the direction and the eccentricity of the sound of the solo. It wasn't until I got in the studio that it came together."

Geddy about the song difficulties:

From Guitar World (March 1990): "Certain songs are a breeze," he explains. "They just click. Though I record the bass and vocal tracks separately, I can put the two together quite easily. There are certain songs, though, like 'The Page' (from Hold Your Fire) that are just ridiculous to pull off live because the two parts have nothing to do with each other. So I really have to practice a lot to get something like that down. There's usually a way of feeling them together. It's a process of splitting yourself, really, I'd love to know how that works, but I just know that it does, eventually, I guess it's like sports-muscle memory, where the body is moving in all differentdirections and yet all the muscles know what they're supposed to be doing...like a dancer or an athlete."

Tai Shan
The meaning of "Tai Shan":

From the Rush FAQ: "Tai' Shan" (from Hold Your Fire) is the name of an actual "holy mountain" in China. The mythical (?) emperor Huang Ti had so much power that he was able to summon all the spirits of the world to him on top of Tai' Shan to proclaim his power.

Legend has it that if you climb to the top of this mountain and "raise your hands to heaven," you will live to be at least 100 years old. Neil wrote these lyrics while sitting at the top of the mountain.

High Water
Neil discusses "High Water"'s meanings:

This is a song that addresses man's primal connection with water.

Neil Peart (1988): "I always feel comfortable when I'm near water, be it the sound of the ocean or even the refreshing feeling od a dip in the swimming pool. I remember being in the center of one of Japan's biggest cities and the noise pollution was incredible. But right in the middle was this garden with a small waterfall that ran over a bunch of stones. It was designed in such a way that if you sat by the waterfall, the sound of water would drown out all the surrounding noises. I think the Japanese understand the therapeutic nature of water better than most."