Geddy Lee on Relearning Rush for the Road

I'll be straight with you: I didn't grow up with Rush. I came to them sideways, the way a lot of people my age do — through a producer sample, or a YouTube algorithm rabbit hole, or some guy at a show insisting you couldn't possibly understand music until you'd heard 2112 front to back. The entry point doesn't matter. What matters is that once you actually listen, you start noticing how much of what you thought was modern — the layered complexity, the singer who's also holding down the low end, the songs that refuse to resolve neatly — has Rush fingerprints on it somewhere upstream.

So when Rick Beato sat down with Geddy Lee for an hour on his YouTube channel, I watched the whole thing. And the first thing Lee said that stopped me wasn't about the Fifty Something Tour, or the setlist, or even the gear. It was this:

"No, you have to relearn."

Beato had asked whether, after more than a decade away from the stage, it all just comes back. Muscle memory, right? And Lee's answer was patient and precise in that way musicians get when they're correcting a civilian assumption: you can play the chords, sure, but your fingers won't be loose. You'll play it, he said, "like an idiot." The technique has to be rebuilt from the ground up — first the hands, then, only once the hands are comfortable, the voice.

There's something in that sequencing that I keep turning over. The body before the performance. The mechanics before the expression. We talk a lot about inspiration and authenticity in music, but Lee's describing something more humbling: craft is a physical condition that decays, and you have to earn it back every time.

The hand IS the sound

The conversation moves quickly into gear territory — Beato is a gear guy, famously — and Lee offers something that cuts through the usual instrument fetishism. He played 27 different basses on Rush's 2015 R40 Live tour. Twenty-seven. And his conclusion?

"I think it sounded like me every song."

The tone is in the hands. Which sounds like a bumper sticker until you actually sit with what it means. Every producer who's ever gone deep on why a sample of one artist sounds immediately like them even when someone else plays the same notes, every vocalist who's been accused of biting another singer's ad-libs and had to explain that the delivery is the thing — they're circling the same truth Lee is naming here. You can chase someone's setup exactly and still not get there, because the signal passes through a human body first.

Lee came up idolizing Chris Squire of Yes — that aggressive, gritty, pick-driven Rickenbacker sound. He wanted that tone badly enough to eventually buy a black Rickenbacker 4001 (which he names explicitly) with his first record advance, walking straight back to the same Toronto music store where he'd been drooling over it for years. But he never actually got Squire's sound. What he got was his own approximation of it, filtered through his own hands and instincts. The failed imitation became the original voice. That's not a comforting myth — it's actually how it works, and it's kind of terrifying if you're still in the imitation phase trying to understand why your hero's tone isn't coming out of your fingers.

The backstory on that P bass is genuinely one of the better origin stories in this interview: teenage Geddy, working weekends at his mom's discount variety store, pooling a few Saturdays of wages to buy a Traynor amp with a twin 15 cabinet. He and his best friend — one Alex Zivojinovich, whom you might know better as Alex Lifeson — didn't think about getting it home until after they'd bought it. They pushed it through three icy Toronto blocks to Geddy's bedroom, freezing the whole way, not laughing. He set it up and couldn't sleep, just lying there staring at the light on the tubes.

That bass eventually got modified into something he calls the "space bass" — teardrop-shaped, pearl inlays, painted like a '60s dune buggy in blue and white. He's apparently been threatening his tech Skully with bringing it out on the Fifty Something Tour. Skully changes the subject every time he brings it up. I respect both of them for their positions.

How Rush actually wrote songs

Here's where the interview earns its runtime. Lee maps out the full arc of how Rush's songwriting process changed across 45 years, and the picture is more complicated — and more interesting — than the mythology usually allows.

Early days: hotel rooms, two acoustic guitars, Neil Peart in the corner. They wrote wherever they had an hour. Hemispheres got written in a rented house in Wales over three weeks before they even walked into Rockfield Studios, which sounded romantic until Lee had to actually sing it. The key was wrong — way too high, written quietly while sitting around jamming, only becoming a problem when it had to fill a room. He describes it as the most difficult recording experience of his life. You do get spontaneity that way, he notes, but you also get yourself into situations.

YYZ — one of the most technically demanding pieces in the catalog — came from a day when Lifeson had to go into town and wasn't there. Lee and Peart were bored, started jamming, and basically built the whole thing as a bass-and-drums conversation. When Lifeson came back and heard it: "What the f** is this?"* Then he got into it. Then he figured out how to play that riff on guitar, which is a different problem entirely. That's the Moving Pictures era method — all three of them in the same room, all the time.

Later, it fragmented. Peart moved to LA, had a family. Lee and Lifeson had their own home studios. They'd send tracks back and forth — instrumental pieces from Lee and Lifeson, lyric fragments from Peart by email — and piece things together like a jigsaw across geography. Lee describes scanning through multiple lyric drafts Peart had sent, landing on one that fit a musical idea they'd been sitting with, and that becoming the seed. The song grew outward from a match between two separately created things.

And then there's Vapor Trails, which is where the interview's emotional weight suddenly concentrates. Peart had lost his daughter and his partner within roughly a year of each other. He'd been away for years. When Rush reconvened to make that record, Lee and Lifeson worked in the control room. They set up a drum kit in the studio and left Peart alone to find his way back to playing. At one point they covered the glass between the rooms so he wouldn't feel observed.

"We had to remember how to be a band again."

They were in the studio for a year.

On Beato, and what this interview is

Rick Beato is a very specific kind of interviewer. He prepares obsessively, he has frameworks for everything — he divides Rush's catalog into distinct "eras" and walks Lee through them with the systematic enthusiasm of someone who's clearly been waiting to have this conversation for decades. The fanboy energy is real and it's also, honestly, sometimes the thing that makes the conversation less interesting than it could be. When Lee brings up Vapor Trails and the emotional weight of that period, Beato's follow-up steers quickly back toward the musicological. The "how" gets more airtime than the "what it cost."

I don't think that's a flaw in Beato specifically — it's a genre limitation. His audience wants the gear talk, the time signatures, the studio method. And Lee obliges, because he's gracious and because that stuff is genuinely interesting. But there are moments in this interview where you can feel a harder conversation sitting just underneath the surface, and Beato's instinct is to map the terrain rather than descend into it.

The interview is 59 minutes. It covers a lot of ground. Alex Lifeson apparently crashes it at some point — and look, the description of Lifeson as a person who just materializes in a conversation about Rush, unannounced, and immediately belongs there is the most on-brand thing I've heard all week.

What Lee is doing this tour, with the Fifty Something dates, is something he seems to be taking seriously in a way that goes beyond nostalgia. He and Lifeson started with a list of 45 songs to potentially play. They fell back in love with too many of them. They're still refining. For a guy who's spent 10+ years off the road, the deliberateness of that process — relearning the hands, then the voice, then the smoothness — reads less like a victory lap and more like someone choosing, carefully, to do a difficult thing again.

"All you have to do," Lee says about getting The Anarchist's overlapping vocal and bass lines into his body, "is play it a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. Until I don't have to think about it. And then I can have a conversation."

I've been thinking about that as a description of what mastery actually costs. Not the inspiration moment, not the natural talent, not the gear — the part where you play something so many times that it stops requiring your conscious attention and becomes available for expression instead. That's when the conversation can happen.

Rush's catalog exists in that space. Lee is rebuilding his access to it, one relearned passage at a time.

— Zoe Kim