The Rush Album Art GalleryThese images are for personal use only, and cannot be redistributed without explicit permission from the webmaster. This gallery features high quality Rush art from the albums and tourbooks for use as desktop wallpaper. Most of these images were simply cropped to fit your monitor, while others were manipulated (requiring a few liberties) to fit the 4x3 proportion. Whenever possible, informational quotes have been included relating to the images. For download and installation help, click here. Download and Installation Help
This is a very image intensive page, containing over 300 wallpaper images. For easier browsing, this page has been broken down into several sections which you can view by clicking one of the links below.
 "I used the explosion graphic because I felt that it represented the nature of the band. For a three-piece group they had a lot of power and force in their sound...We agreed on a concept and an approach. In Rush's early days they didn't have much money and so I kept it to a 2 colour job (black and red)" - Paul Weldon, Chemistry
"One of the first lyrics I submitted to Alex and Geddy was 'Fly By Night,' and when the time came to make our first album together, we decided that was a good title. (Our other candidate was Aurora Borealis, so we probably made the better choice.) As a bird lover since childhood, I remembered an illustration of a snowy owl swooping down toward the viewer with fierce eyes, and I suggested an image like that for the cover, maybe with the northern lights in the background. It fell to me to talk on the phone to the record company artist in Chicago, and try to describe this picture in words. In the same way that writing those few lyrics for the band would lead to me becoming the band’s chief wordsmith, that phone conversation led to me becoming the 'graphic arts supervisor.'" - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005
"In 1975, just before we recorded our next album, Caress of Steel, our manager, Ray, showed me an illustration by the keyboard player with one of Ray’s other clients, Ian Thomas. The keyboard player was Hugh Syme, and thus began a 30-year collaboration between Hugh and me, on album covers, tour books, my own book covers, instructional videos, Buddy Rich tribute albums, concert DVDs – basically anything with my name on it, would have Hugh’s name on it. Hugh and I learned some lessons early on. We discussed ideas for the Caress of Steel cover, and Hugh drew the illustrations and even made each of the letters from acrylic resin, cast in three dimensions. However, someone at the record company felt inspired to make a few 'creative' alterations, and when I first saw the completed album (in a record store in Winnipeg, as I recall), the illustrations were framed in bizarre fluffy clouds, and instead of the silvery, metallic look we had envisioned, the whole cover had an awful, washed-out tint of...let’s say cold tea." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005 "The first one I did was Caress of Steel. They were pencil drawings, even though they don't look like it on the album. They printed them in a sort of pseudo-sepia tone. I had vignetted with an airbrush the blue area around the illustrations, which was later reinterpreted by the film strippers who were making the jackets in Chicago at the time. They took it upon themselves to cut a hard-edged mask around it. The lettering was cast, and chrome plated." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983  Originally included in the Caress Of Steel collage, this live image taken June 25th, 1975, at Toronto's Massey Hall later appeared in the "2006 Official Wall Calendar".
  "All it means is the abstract man against the masses. The red star symbolizes any collectivist mentality." - Neil Peart, Creem, 1982 "The man is the hero of the story. That he is nude is just a classic tradition ... the pureness of his person and creativity without the trappings of other elements such as clothing. The red star is the evil red star of the Federation, which was one of Neil's symbols. We basically based that cover around the red star and that hero." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
 "All the World's a Stage, where you opened up the cover and, wow, there were three pages of pictures of us in action on stage...." - Geddy Lee with Geoff Barton, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981
"He was really a rake of a man, really, really thin and he was perfect for the part. He had a beautifully receding forehead already and all I had to do was go and retouch his mouth, should and knee joints to appear mannequin-like." - Hugh Syme, Chemistry
 "Well, that's basically a sore point with the marketing aspect of the management. They had the name of the package in mind as Archives, and I had every intention of making a look as much a part of the archives as possible-as opposed to being a rock 'n' roll cover. It's almost a library piece. It's changed a little bit: it was sort of repackaged again two years ago. For all the cover being very sedate-albeit a little boring and uneventful-it involved a special cover treatment which was actually more expensive than most covers." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
"...we still don't talk about Hemispheres..." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005   "The band told me, 'Go ahead, we'll see it when we get back,' because they were in Wales for the whole album and all my conversations with them were over the telephone. They didn't see it until it got out. Technically, it's an abomination. Once again, it's an effort in the progressive area of punning. They talk about Apollo and Dionysius in the lyrics, so I figured that Apollo would be the severe, Magritte business man, and that Dionysius would, again, be the reinstitution of a figure." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
"There are always the inevitable last minute crises, such as the Chicago Daily Tribune being still so embarrassed about their 'Dewey defeats Truman' error of more than thirty years ago that they actually refused to let us use it on the cover!" - Neil Peart, "Personal Waves", Permanent Waves Tourbook
"Permanent Waves is the result of a conversation which I had with Neil out at his home in the country. We spoke all evening about Rush growing up, and how we were going to do these EKG readings of each member as they were recording. We were going to tape their temples and chests and have real heartbeats of them while they were playing. So Permanent Waves was going to be a technical statement, and we were going to treat that with red and gold foil, and do a nice study in design- as opposed to a photographic thing. I walked out and, in the doorway, said 'Wait! Let's try something with Donna Reed, with her permanent Toni hairdo, and have her walking out of a tidal wave situation.' Neil gave me this blank look and said, 'Get out of here.' The following day, he asked me to consider doing just that because he'd discussed it with the band, and they'd all thought it was more likely for a cover than the serious approach." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
"A pun, a pure pun. It became pertinent to me later that the Queen's Park building In Toronto where it was shot had all the right elements: three arches, three pillars per arch; there are three members of Rush, and all of that. I asked that the witch be in there, only because of the song 'Witch Hunt', which I played on. The one painting had to be of Joan Of Arc as far as I was concerned - which ended up being a bit of a nightmare because I couldn't find any archival pictures or paintings which were suitable. So I ended up getting some burlap, and a pine post, two sticks and a bottle of scotch. Deborah Samuel, the photographer who I used on that session, got wrapped up in burlap so she could make her cameo appearance. We just lit lighter fluid in pie plates in the foreground. It was basically a half hour session because we had no other alterative but to do it ourselves." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
"Released by the German company entirely without our knowledge or consent (not that they need it), and certainly contains nothing of any interest - not even the cover, and certainly not that title. We wouldn't do that. Have you noticed that everyone puns with our name except us?" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988
Rush References found on the Exit Stage Left cover: the equipment box is stencilled with the "Rush" logo from the debut album; an owl from Fly By Night; a painting of the Caress of Steel cover (a mirror image, as originally the cover was to face the other way as explained by Hugh Syme below); the star logo from 2112; the puppet king from A Farewell to Kings; Apollo and Dionysus from Hemispheres; the woman from Permanent Waves and the two movers from Moving Pictures. In addition, the "players" are all "stage left", and the word "exit" is painted on the back stage door.
"The theatre scene was captured at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, which had been closed since 1928 and had fallen into disrepair. The plan was to use the original people from previous album covers, which caused no end of problems. 'We discovered the perils of having people waiting,' says Hugh Syme; worse, some had unexpected expectations. 'Paula Turnbull [the same model pictured on Permanent Waves] became a noted model in Europe - enough that when I brought her back, she was appalled to know that I didn't have a trailer for her.' Josh Anderson, the original "king" on A Farewell To Kings couldn't get there at all: his plane was delayed due to weather...'We had owls, we had a of of people in attendance but no puppet king. I, believing with the blind optimism that I have, that if I go down Yonge Street in the middle of a blizzard, I just might lucky. So, we were touring down Yonge Street, between the windscreen wipers I could see peoples' faces vaguely through the blizzard and I saw this guy like a beacon. There he was, a thin man in the midst of our panic, on Yonge street. I jumped out of the car, went up to him and he was pretty taken aback, because I was not in the frame of mind to being sensitive to what a passer by may think of this request, I was hell bent on having him come to the session and do this. He said he was en route to the stereo shop to buy a stereo and I said, can it wait, can you come, can you go into makeup. He went into makeup for two hours and he came out a puppet. No one has ever noticed that it was not the same character and I bought the man his stereo for his services.'" - Chemistry "We decided to go with the girl pulling the curtain back on the front instead of the back. It was originally intended to be the other way around, so when I flipped the photograph over, I had to write 'RUSH' on the equipment box in the foreground, and I had to strip out the information on the Stage Door and write in the word 'EXIT.' [The crowd shot is from an actual Rush concert in Buffalo, N.Y.], we really wanted the band. Believe it or not, we went to about 15 shows, trying to get the band saying 'Thank you, good night,' and at the same time, walking towards the camera." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983
"The pictures on the inner sleeve of Exit Stage Left are unidentifiable as Rush group members. Guitarist Alex Lifeson's face is obscured by his arm, Peart has his back towards the camera and is almost obscured by assorted timpani, and Lee is just a murky blue silhouette. Geddy: 'That was sort of accidental, but in the end it worked out real well. We just picked the photographs we thought were neat and different. But I take your point - and after all, it's a complete departure from All the World's a Stage, where you opened up the cover and, wow, there were three pages of pictures of us in action on stage. This time we wanted to be a little more subtle..." - Geddy Lee with Geoff Barton, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981 "The whole title came from a character in an American cartoon called Snagglepuss. He's a great little creature, a lion, and every time there's trouble he flees, uttering 'Exit...stage left' or 'Exit...stage right'. But the fact of the matter was that the album cover picture was taken from stage left. And coincidentally that's the direction in which Snagglepuss runs most of the time." - Geddy Lee, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981 "We wanted to have Snagglepuss's tail on there. You know, 'Exit Stage Left', with a picture of just his tail. Forget it! They wanted all kinds of legal hassles and tons of money." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996
"We wanted the album to sound different and we also thought that the packaging should have a different feel. When we were talking about Signals, Hugh had this concept of taking the idea down to a basic human level - territorial or even sexual. So that's how the design with the dog and the fire hydrant came about. The little map on the back features make-believe subdivisions, with a lot of silly names and places. The red dots represent all the fire hydrants and basically the whole thing maps out a series of territories." - Geddy Lee, Success Under Pressure, 1984
 "The serene and peaceful bottom part of the picture represents 'grace', the turbulent and troubled top represents 'pressure'. Thus; 'grace" under "pressure', or 'P' over 'G'. The humanoid figure is just a symbol relating to the two conditions, but also relates a bit to 'The Body Electric.'" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", Janurary 1988 "The background imagery simply mirrors the P/G symbol; grace UNDER pressure In a physical sense. Abstract, but simple. The head represents the onlooker perhaps, or an "everyman" symbol facing the world, and perhaps a hint of the character In 'The Body Electric'. That’s about it really." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988 "...the people in 'Red Sector A', the concentration camp, are being graceful under pressure. Despite those horrific conditions, they tried to retain some semblance of normal living conditions - something they can hold on to. One idea for the album cover was someone reaching out from behind barbed wire to clutch a flower." Neil Peart, Music Express, June 1984  "I think the picture brings out our personalities quite nicely. But it also looks like a bar mitzvah photo, doesn't it?" - Geddy Lee, St. Paul Pioneer Press "We enjoyed a pleasant day in Ottawa, having ourselves immortalized by the famous portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh. It was an inspiring and elevating experience to sit before the lens of the portrayer of kings, queens, presidents, popes, astronauts, authors, scientists and film stars. And there he was, taking an album cover photo for bums like us! It was wonderful to see, at his seventy-five years of age, his tremendous energy, creativity and swift changes of mood. He provided us with a memorable and broadly applicable quote when told that the lights in the room were not independently adjustable: 'That is not an answer that I can accept. That is not an answer that I can accept!'"- Neil Peart, "Pressure Release", P/G Tourbook
"It is pretty abstract...I love the scene of this sort of Billy Bibbit-like character confused as to his reality. The windows that he's looking out are in a sense very powerful windows. This is an album of power. We are talking about different types of power and the way they affect us, and the way they affect him. The boy is a little shaken as to which way he should look and which window is his reality." - Geddy Lee, "Rockline", Nov 18, 1985
 "Perplexing as it was for management to comprehend (who were approving the budget for this street scene extravaganza), Hugh decided to retire the street scene to the inner sleeve, replacing it with an outer cover that was shocking in its simplicity. In these pre-digital days, however, even this was not simple to produce. 'The "Rush" type was vacuum formed and inset into a 4 x 8 feet plastic surface that was then painted by an auto body shop,' explains [photographer] Glen [Wexler]. 'The red balls are a repetition of a suspended billiard ball.' There was plenty that could be read into sympolism fo the three balls, caught in a mutual, perpetual orbit. 'Sure, you can look at it as three people, three balls, but it's all that and more,' said Geddy." - Chemistry "We began with the idea which appears on the inner sleeve, then decided it would be graphically interesting to simplify it down to the image which appears on the cover, and let the full image be revealed in a secondary manner. Reverse reduction." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988 "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." - Geddy Lee, "Only Music", December 1987
"The cover of Hold Your Fire was art-directed by Hugh Syme as a pun-filled street scene. To tie up a city street was considered extortionate, so Hugh, living in Los Angeles at the time, decided to go small, engaging photographer Glen Wexler and three miniaturists, Patrick Johnson, Scott Alexander and Olivia Ramiriez to help bring the dark, wet street to life. 'The main building was built at 1/12 scale, as were the Jackson alley buildings (left over from a Michael Jackson shoot. 'Glen still had the buildings, so we used them to create an alley to the left of the foreground building')' explains Scott. 'The diner and the other details to the right side of the main building were done at 1/24 scale, as forced perspective elements.' Apart from working with Scott in the painting and finishing of the set, including the neon sign on the Chinese diner, and a cat in the alley that Hugh cut out of some black paper, fraying the edges to catch the light, Hugh and Glen worked for several days to light the finished set. The 'water' on the street was paint thinner, continually having to be reapplied as it kept evaporating, and the juggler's fireballs were basketballs, coated with highly flammable rubber cement. 'I combined several individual photographic images by reexposing them on 8x10 film in my darkroom,' says Glen Wexler. For characters, the original plan was to use actor Dennis Hopper as the juggler but a schedule conflict prevented this. 'We ended up casting Stanley Brock, best known for his role in the movie Tin Men, says Glen. The boy in the window with his binoculars was the same Toronto stockbroker as Hugh had sit for his painting for Power Windows, flown down to LA for the shoot. 'The final photographic components (the juggler, the three fireballs, the boy in the window with the binoculars, the Dalmatian, his fire hydrant and the shot of the minature road cases in the loading bay) were sent out to the lab for what was then called emulsion stripping, where the film for all these separate elements is literally cut to create one composite transparency.' says Hugh. 'This was then exposed to separate full scale film sheets that were each impregnated with ink. These were then each laid onto the paper to create the final dye transfer print. I would then, using bleach and dye, retouch the print to create a (hopefully) seamless sense that the final shot was taken all 'in camera' as a believable study in 'improbable reality'.'" - Chemistry "The set [which is only 18-inches tall] was built by Scott Alexander. The road cases are only two inches square. When I look at this neighbourhood, one has to wonder, 'Where is this?' I couldn't resist putting the 'Signals' dog, Spot, next to the fire hydrant. The boy from 'Power Windows' makes another appearance, this time looking out the window, down the street, at something we're not yet made aware of." - Hugh Syme, Visions "The band felt that the thematic 'tie-in' to the other covers was probably a bit too 'much' - where Mr. Syme had preferred the inclusion of these elements." - email from HughSyme.com explaining why the Signals dog and the boy from Power Windows were removed from the final printed version, Apr. 21, 2003 "Did you find the secret phone number in there?...You could win a million dollars!" - Alex Lifeson, Rockline, Feb. 6th, 1989
 "Isn't it awful when you have to explain your jokes? It's so awkward when the joke fails, and people insist you try - no one ever laughs at the explanation of a joke. Anyway, the idea was that these bunnies are taking matters into their own, um...paws, and making themselves appear from the hat, and flying around in it. Go on - laugh your head off!" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", January 1994
"...the artwork was lame." - Neil Peart, Rollingstone.com Interview, June 5, 1997
Besides the cover, all remaining images were greatly manipulated to fit your monitor. I created the group photo by merging the three portrait images contained in the album art. To a greater extent, I extended the "flying wishbones" to fit your monitor by stretching the background without affecting the original wishbones, and added a few more to the formation. To the back cover (the "flying femurs") I removed the song listing and expanded the right side of the image. "The cover art reflects a style of 17th century Dutch painting called vanitas, in which symbols, such as the skull (and also candles, books, flowers, playing cards, etc.), were used to remind the good Netherlanders of life's brevity, and the ultimate transience of all material things and sensual pleasures...No order [to the numbers on the dice], just descending into chaos." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club newsletter", January 1994
"From Evanston, Wyoming, to Salt Lake City, it was 150 miles of mountainous riding...The elaborate fold-out booklet in our Counterparts CD showed a small black-and-white photograph of me standing in front of the band's tour bus with my bicycle. (Beside it is one of me with the Mohawk...) Andrew took that shot early on a frigid morning in the early summer of 1992, at a truck stop in Evanston, Wyoming. I was just about to set off on my second ride over that arduous route, during the Roll the Bones tour." - Neil Peart, Roadshow "...the final stop on our Roll the Bones tour, in 1992. I was wearing bandanas on my head on that tour, to keep the sweat our of my eyes, and before the show, I got Andrew (MacNaughtan) to shave my head into a Mohawk, which I kept hidden until the encore. Then I pulled off the bandana and got a big laugh out of Alex and Geddy and the crew." - Neil Peart, Roadshow
 "I was up in Yellowknife last June on a motorcycle trip across the country, and there's one of those Inukashuk above the town overlooking it, and I was quite taken with it. I bought a postcard almost exactly the image you see on the cover ... I just came back with this postcard and I thought of 'test for echo.' I thought that's exactly what these men mean when you're out in the wilderness ... when you've been hiking for a few days and you come across one of these things, it's such an affirmation that there's life out there. Again the same thing: it's an echo ... and that's the feeling a traveler in the Arctic would get, that it was a sign of life. The same with the satellite dishes. I was kind of referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the test for echo going out that way." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996 "Hugh Syme constructed an Inuit effigy out of rocks, but his was less than 18 inches high." - Chemistry [webmaster note, the 18" high model is reportedly made out of styrofoam!]
     These five Test for Echo images were all enhanced to remove staples, printed lyrics, folds, etc., or to fit the proportions of your monitor. As I had space to fill in the "Half the World" 'torn up photograph' image, I took the liberty to create a new constellation.
 "We had actually done a version of it with three astronauts on it to reflect our three guys that keep appearing here and there as the stone-carvers and the mountain-climbers, so we had a version of that with the Inukashauk under the light and the three astronauts in the foreground. They made us change it, so that's how that came about. They were quite amenable to letting us use the original image, which I thought was nice enough, but they wouldn't hear of us (altering it). We figured that image was still relevant to the song." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996
"I got a little bit involved because I didn't want [Mercury Records] doing what they had done the last time they did a thing like that [Chronicles]. Last time they did it...the artwork was lame. So I got involved myself and made sure the artwork was decent..." - Neil Peart, Rollingstone.com Telephone Interview, June 5, 1997
   The original artwork of the back cover and the "thank you" page have the same background texture, which I merged to create the final "schematic" image. The smaller Different Stages live shots were manipulated for the far right image; as many images as possible were arranged to fill the 4x3 proportion of your monitor. The Different Stages memorabilia foldout was retouched and cropped as five individual subjects.
"Shooting all those Rush items took me weeks... I mean weeks!!!" - Andrew MacNaugtan, TriNet Chat, Dec. 15th, 2002 
"I love the packaging he did on Different Stages, that's one of my favorites. I'm touting tickets outside; Alex in a straight jacket..." - Geddy Lee, Classic Rock, Oct. 2004
"For me, [the cover] represents the burning fire of life. It is a beautiful painting, and off of [the ball of fire] comes sparks and trails and whispers... Those are very symbolic to me, they represent memory, spirit, all sorts of things that are connected to life...." - Geddy Lee, "...And the things that we leave behind." - Alex Lifeson, "Rockline", May 15, 2002
    Released by Mercury records less than one year after the release of Vapor Trails on Atlantic. Art direction and design by Hugh Syme, 'then' photo by Fin Costello, 'now' photo by Andrew MacNaughtan (previously appeared in the Vapor Trails tourbook). All images were enhanced to remove staples, printed lyrics, folds, and manipulated to fit the proportions of your monitor. As the final cover image had a great deal of empty space after stretching the width, to fill space I brought the dalmation out from behind the radio.
"We did not have a lot of input in this. This was mostly a record company project. Our opinions were made known and they were very cooperative about doing good packaging for us." - Geddy Lee, USAToday.com chat, Feb 5, 2003
"...the dragon was picked on by Hugh to become the representative of the show in Rio, and of course he's got him dressed up like Carmen Miranda." - Geddy Lee, Contents Under Pressure
Live images from the Rush In Rio CD art.
   The cover art originally appeared on the R30 Tourbook. The "postal package" is the CD sleeve from the Deluxe edition; both it and the cover of the DVD booklet featuring the return of the dragon, were created by merging the front and back covers of their respective pieces. The live photo is a performance of "Between The Wheels" from the R30 tour.
   
"To my surprise, 'snakes and arrows' called up several links to something called 'Leela, The Game of Self Knowledge,' or, incredibly, 'The Game of Snakes and Arrows.'..created by Buddhist saints and sages as a game of karma—like many games, a metaphor for life...When I told Alex and Geddy about the Leela connection, and showed them the gameboard painted by Harish Johari, they were as excited by all that serendipity as I was, and we agreed to use his painting for the cover." - Neil Peart, "The Game of Snakes & Arrows"  As explained by Peart, the highway image began as a photo he took near Amboy, California. The giant arrows are nearly identical to those at the famous "Twin Arrows Trading Post", found on "Route 66" 20 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona.
"Leaving the park at Twentynine Palms, I continued north on the road to the ghost town of Amboy, and Roy’s Motel, which appeared in Ghost Rider. In fact, unknown to most people, Amboy also appears on the booklet cover of the Snakes and Arrows CD, and lately, on the new concert DVD, plus at the beginning of the 'What’s That Smell?' film that played before 'Far Cry' during our concerts this past summer. I watched it every night from my 'waiting-chair' behind Geddy’s ampline (er, rotisseries), before the second set, and it always gave me a smile. Back in 2006, when Hugh Syme and I were trading ideas for that Snakes and Arrows cover, we discussed a surreal desert highway scene. As a reference, I sent him one of my Ghost Rider photographs, taken on a stretch of old Route 66, looking west toward the cluster of crumbling buildings at Amboy, with the unmistakable Amboy Crater in the distance. Hugh ended up 'building' the scene on that original photo, which had been taken in 1998 (as a slide, in those days). Like the Monument Valley ten-years-apart photo that appeared in a story earlier this year, 'South by Southwest,' I decided to pause for a ten-year anniversary shot of Route 66 and Amboy." - Neil Peart, News Weather & Sports, December 2008
Images from the Snakes & Arrows Live video linernotes.
Tour Book & Miscellaneous Images
"For our first British tour, our record company over there printed up a...vivid little pamphlet, I guess you might call it. We didn’t have anything to do with that one, best described as a 'curiosity'." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tourbooks 1977-2004
"As much as I loved the Candy Apple Red finish of my Tamas, I just couldn't have the same color again! Neal [Graham at the Percussion Center in Fort Wayne] and I discussed a few possibilities, and he did me up a sample with a mix consisting of an opalescent white base, with just a hint of pink in it, and a few metallic flecks to highlight the opalescence. (More goodies from the "hot rod" finishes book!) I stayed with the brass plating on the hardware - because I couldn't think of anything nicer!" - Neil Peart, Modern Drummer, May 1987
"They wanted the portraits to reflect their personality to some degree...Each guy was responsible for coming up with his own concept. It was to be tongue-in-cheek and playful. The entire dressing room and the noses was all Geddy's idea. So they played up on that. Andrew recruited a special effects makeup artist to come over and make a mold of Geddy's nose in turn reproducing the noses several times out of plaster and placed them on stands." - "An Introduction to Andrew MacNaughtan", Trinet
"This photo was taken in October '92, during a Bicycle Africa tour of Mali, Senegal, and The Gambia. Djenne is a medieval town in the inland delta of the Niger River, not far from Timbuktu. The 'Great Mosque,' like the rest of Djenne, is built of mud, and every year after the rains they have to climb up and resurface that mud, using the exposed beams as scaffolding. The minarets are topped with ostrich eggs, and altogether it's about as amazing a thing as this reporter has ever seen. My friend Mendelson Joe says this photo looks like 'a retired hockey player visiting another planet.' And that's about how I felt -- except for the 'retired hockey player' part." - Neil Peart, Counterparts Tourbook
"About two months before each tour, Hugh and I would discuss creative directions for the new tour book, deciding which graphic elements from the album art we might like to use (like with Test for Echo, when we used an alternate, moodier version of the album cover for the tour book)..." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tourbooks 1977-2004
"In the original Vapor Trails design, Hugh Syme had one version of the cover, where on the back, very small in the corner, was this very tiny dinosaur, who was the cause of this great vapor trail. And when we were doing the preproduction for the tour, I was looking for animation ideas to use live. I wondered what it would be like to expolit that little dragon a bit more, turn him into a character, which people at Spin Productions developed into a full-blown character that we used during 'One Little Victory' live. It was a cool, humorous way to use this dragon...the dragon was picked on by Hugh to become the representative of the show in Rio, and of course he's got him dressed up like Carmen Miranda." - Geddy Lee, Contents Under Pressure "I love Alex's portrait and I love Neil's portrait in the desert - I'm really proud of that...the Neil in the desert shot that was my idea. I really wanted to try something that felt really special instead of just shooting the drum kit against a backdrop which is something we've done for the last five tours. I really wanted to do something a little more artful and challenging. The shot of Alex, I think I said to him 'I want to do something weird and sort of stupid. What about a shot of you on a beach with chicks and bikinis.' And then he said, 'Oh no, how about this: how about you shoot a huge muscle guy, like Charles Atlas was the term he used, and then take a picture of my head and stick it on his body.' Perfect and that's what we did and that's how quickly it came about. And just so you know we didn't really squish Alex's head that much, this guy was absolutely huge. When I showed Alex the picture of the guy, he was laughing so hard he was actually crying. He could not believe how hilarious that photo turned out." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Fye.com, Sep. 26, 2003
   "...we aimed to create the drumset equivalent of the 'dream cars' displayed at auto shows, a showpiece that was also the ultimate expression of crafsmanship." - Neil Peart, R30 Tourbook
"A photo shoot by Demborah Samuels for Tama drums involved setting up Neil's kit in the middle of the lake [outside Le Studio]. 'The boys took the drums out of the rowboats and set them up on this little swim platform,' says Terry Brown. 'The stool was litterally right at the back, and I know it freaked him out - it scared the crap out of him!'" - Chemistry "After Deborah's great shot on the lake, I'd always wanted to shoot Neil with his drumkit in an exotic location. Sabian shipped the kit down from Toronto, and said why don't we shoot it in a forest or something. I just love that shot where I'm way back and it's just a moment of him playing the drums amongst all the forest. It was so surreal because when he started to play, you could almost see all the squirrels halting and birds flying away, with him playing away! I know Neil got off on it as well, he'll put in the extra effort if its done well, and artistic and tasteful." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Chemistry
More R30 tourbook images from the last 30 years, most are alternative/similar photos to those which appeared in earlier tourbooks. The Test For Echo live photo originally appeared on the "Clusterworks" information insert from Different Stages.
"...this time the hardware is plated in black nickel...the finish is Aztec Red, inset with a pair of logos Hugh Syme and I created for the CD package. The Greek symbol ouroboros, or snake eating its tail, surrounds a calligraphic rendering of my favorite road sign: the universal symbol for 'winding road' (On a motorcycle or in a fast car, that's the best kind of 'snake and arrow' you can see.)" - Neil Peart, Snakes & Arrows Tourbook
Solo Projects
 "Andrew photographed Alex in a number of different ways - wearing make up, with water on his face, darkening his eyes, 'aging' his face, etc. He then painstakingly hand cut each photo and finally put Alex' face back together like a puzzle... At one point, a coffee cup was inadvertently placed on one of the photos leaving behind its mark. By then Andrew said 'the hell with it!', took a cigarette and burned a mark on another of the photos." - "An Introduction to Andrew MacNaughtan", TriNet
  "As far as the album cover goes, it's a very abstract representation of the title. It kind of represents the yin and yang of that phrase. Half in heaven, half in hell. The character on the cover finds himself torn between these two worlds. It's a little abstract but a lot of fun...the slinky is part of what we call a Gordian knot which is a knot that is almost impossible to untie. It's kind of representative of that phrase." - Geddy Lee, "Rockline", Nov. 29, 2000    "This packaging is technically referred to as a 'Digipack' and record companies generally do not like to use them claiming that they cost more to produce. Which may well be the case based on the fact that their production is geared up to use the plastic 'Jewel Box' and as a result any other type of request is considered a special order. So, if an artist insists on using the 'digipack' type of cover they will make that artist pick up the extra cost. They also claim that 'MARKET RESEARCH TELLS US THAT FANS REALLY PREFER JEWEL BOXES AND VIEW THEM AS BETTER VALUE FOR MONEY'. As for myself I much prefer the 'digipack' type of packaging for the following reasons, more environmentally friendly, they feel better in your hands (like an album cover!..I'm old fashioned I guess!), they look much better in terms of graphic display, and they don't shatter the instant you open them like the dreaded Jewel Box!! Although they may have a tendency to fray a bit over time. For those artists that believe that artwork is important in ways beyond the practical, unique packaging usually becomes a bit of a battle with most of the larger record companies. Even for very successful artists." - Geddy Lee, The Geddy Lee Interactive Website, Jan. 11, 2001
"I started a series of 'Ghost Rider' photographs, where I would stop in the middle of an empty road, park my bike on the centerstand so it looked as if it was riding along, then run back down the road to take a photo from behind, of bike, diminishing highway, and surrounding landscape." - Neil Peart, [Letter to Hugh Syme, Feb. 11, 1999], Ghost Rider
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