Signals Radio Special
Promo album by Anthem Records for radio broadcast, September 1982, transcribed by Dave Ward and Eric Hansen
Interviewer: Signals, the new album from Rush. For the next hour, music and conversation with Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Here's Geddy Lee:
Lee: We found with Moving Pictures everything went great and we were real pleased with the sound of it and we sort of accomplished a real trio sound, a big sound. And we were afraid of going in the studio and doing Moving Pictures Part 2. There was no sense in doing that. We didn't want to approach the recording from the same aspects, so a fundamental desire to want to shift the sound of the band on record led to what Signals is, which is in some ways almost a four-piece band rather than a three-piece.
Interviewer: "Subdivisions", one of the most lasting and highest and most used things about our culture, and especially North American culture, is the suburbs. We're products of the suburbs.
Peart: Yeah, it's a common background for each of us, and I kind of think it's a background for a lot of our audience, too. For all its blandness, it's so easy to satirize, which is a trap I wanted to avoid. It's always been a constant stock joke or skit or something, to satirize the suburbs and the mentality of it and all. And of course it's just as diverse as people are really, when you come down to it. But it has its own set of values and set of background parameters about it, that are as you say are very much unique to this contemporary society.
["Subdivisions" plays]
Lee: Instead of having your basic heavy metal guitar sound, triple tracked or tracked four times or however many, we wanted to have one real present, ambient, nice guitar that just sat in a place, and then get a keyboard sound that sat in a place, and have the drum approach... The whole technique to recording drums is totally different this time. We wanted to approach everything from a real fresh, and I guess somewhat experimental point-of-view.
Interviewer: Staying with the guitar playing just a sec, the thing I noticed was, you're talking about how you recorded, but just what you're playing to me is radically different. The whole band I think has changed inside out where I think a lot of, say what you used to carry, Alex, in terms of guitar lines and stuff, you [Geddy] seem to be doing more with bass, keyboards and voice. It's almost like Neil and Alex are swirling around this foundation that you've created. This to me is like real inside out playing for Rush. I mean, Alex is the best example of that.
Peart: Yeah, Alex and I are often the rhythm section on some of these songs, where Alex is actually playing what amounts to a bass part. And he and I are working off each other the way Geddy and I often used to. And the keyboards become a dominant instrument, the guitar and I become the rhythm section basically.
Interviewer: Ok, "Analog Kid". Lyrically this guy seems to be quite enthralled, almost ready to give himself over to this vision. It's very much of a seduction.
Peart: Yeah, it's kind of that post-adolescent period you go through where everything but where you are seems to be larger-than-life. Whether you're in the suburbs or a city or a small town, whatever, it all seems to be so gray, whereas when you talk about far-away places or you think about London, England or Los Angles or New York, these places seem to be totally removed from any of your experience, and they seem to be literally larger than life, such romantic things. And it's basically a picture of that vision, you know, of being in what you're used to and dreaming about what you're not used to.
["Analog Kid" plays]
Lee: This is the first album that we'd done after we had a long period of time off, and where we'd all done writing on our own. So a lot of what happened on this album was a coming together of individual ideas that people had soft of in mind for their own purposes. So when we put things together, they were already ideas that we'd lived with for a long time in our own context, and sort of assembled them. So from one aspect you're talking about our own invention where we all consciously sat down and tried to write something on our own, and then the other thing comes in where they accidentally all fall together into a whole different context than we'd ever imagined.
Lifeson: And also a lot of the other material that we used to fill the gaps, and just for other material, we got from sound checks. From the inspirational angle of it, of just coming in early in the day and playing for the fun of playing.
Interviewer: "Chemistry" is a good example of that, isn't it?
Lee: Yeah, the whole song was written in a soundcheck, and we had all these soundcheck tapes and Alex and I sat down at home and put the song together. So the whole song was done before we even got to play it for Neil!
Peart: Yeah...
Lifeson: I think it has a real strong emotional feel to it but it's not a flashy, million-notes-per-hour kind of... which is a direction I've tried to take for a long time. I feel a lot more comfortable with a little more melody, a little more feel.
Lee: There's an example of something you can do at Le Studio, because it's in the country, that you couldn't do in the city. For his solo, we put all the amps outside, aimed them at the mountains, and he recorded his solo outside, so that echoed off it. That's something we've done before, but never on a raging lead solo. The echo was all natural, and it had a real special sound to it.
Lifeson: It took a couple of days to achieve that, but it was well worth it.
Lee: It was great, because here was this huge Marshall stack outside, aimed at the lake and the hills, and you could be back at the house while he's working on his solo, and you'd hear his solo raging around!
["Chemistry" plays]
Interviewer: "Digital Man", I think perhaps one of the most interesting songs on the album. Certainly again we talk about swirling effects and a lot of different things happening above and below the surface. That sounds like a lot of different things happening at once, or a couple of different ideas sort of colliding together at once.
Lee: "Colliding" is a good word.
Peart: That was the mish-mash approach to trying to take diverse influences and make them work together. It starts out basically as a hard rock trio, then goes into a ska or reggae style of rhythmic approach, then it has sort of a modern contemporary European approach to the sequencer chorus and then goes right back down to a basic trio again for the instrumental section, and then builds up through the changes again. It's all very confused. [laughter]
Lee: Yeah it's all very confusing to me too. We spent so much time on that, trying to get it to feel right, and for the longest time we had no faith in the song, and then suddenly it just blossomed. And now for me it's one of my favorite songs on the album. It just works great. It was a battle to get all these influences to feel natural somehow, to feel like they worked. It was like fighting the machines around you for days, and then eventually it just came together.
["Digital Man" plays]
Lifeson: We sort of had tentative plans about possibly thinking about, maybe one day looking at doing solo projects. And we both had written a fair bit of material on our own. Consequently, when we got together to write this album we had piles and piles of material that we just pieced together.
Lee: We made a suit! [laughter]
Interviewer: Well, I think a classic example of something like that, is "The Weapon". I mean, it's a classic case of man versus machine, Neil versus Roland drum synthesiser. Who won Neil? What happened? Explain exactly.
Peart: Well, just when Geddy and his friend Oscar had been working together on what basically became the chorus of the song, and Oscar had made up this ridiculous drum beat on the Roland drum machine, it had all kinds of strange off-beats in it and stuff. And Geddy used that as his demo that he played for us as some ideas that he'd worked on at home. And listening to the drum beat it sounded totally impossible to play because it was things that aren't physically normally done. So I decided that I did want to try to mimic it, because it was a really interesting and unusual rhythm. So I just sat down and tried to learn it and ended up using my left hand to do things my right hand would normally do, and just playing sort of backwards to try and copy it. It's a very interesting thing to do, learn from a machine!
["The Weapon" plays]
Interviewer: The song called "The Weapon" is labelled as "Part Two Of Fear". Now "Witch Hunt" was "Part Three of Fear". I never saw Part One and where's this thing going or where does it start or where's it coming from or what's it about?
Lee: No, this is "Part Four", isn't it? [laughter] Where's "Part One"?
Interviewer: I mean, actually that was my question.
Lifeson: Make up your minds! Oh, I don't know. [laughter]
Interviewer: I mean, it seems like displaced chapters of a story.
Peart: Yeah, well I just had three individual ideas that are related to that common theme. And it just happened that the first one to be written was "Witch Hunt", which I always had in mind as being the third part of this little thematic piece. So I saw nothing wrong really, with using it a piece at a time and eventually "Part One" may or may not ever appear. I learned better and more concise ways of expressing myself using fewer words more accurately, and learning more of the exact meanings of words and how to use less syllables more effectively rhythmically, you know. So you can have a short line that seems to say, or does say, a lot more than the words would seem to convey.
Interviewer: That taken too, but with just what your lyrics are saying to me, when I hear lyrics off the Signals album, I relate to them emotionally now. Where before you're observing them. For instance, "New World Man" is a classic example. I mean, that song for me hits a bit close to home. It's almost embarrassing for me to read because I see myself in that song and that's never happened in a Rush song for me and I know I'm not alone. So even on that level too, again, it's not a matter of some guy oppressed by society in "2112". You're talking about me!
Peart: Yeah, Ok...
Lee: For me, in a lot of Neil's lyrics on this album, there's a pulse that runs through almost every song that relates to a present sort of reality. A present situation that maybe we all have gone through at some point in the growing-up stage or in the stage we find ourselves at now. But there's a real sort of link to today.
Interviewer: Oh yeah, a very timely contemporary feel. Which, again, is this a matter of you developing new tools?
Peart: Yeah, I think so. It's not something that I consciously sat down and said I want to write about modern times, but it certainly did develop that way. I think my input in terms of what I've been reading and so on, has been more concerned with the present day or with this century at least, and less with a timeless fantastic approach or with futuristic or whatever.
Interviewer: Fantasy is what I labeled them.
Peart: Yeah, there's been much less of that in terms of my reading and much more the 20th Century approach to writing which has been either realistic or romantically naturalistic, slightly idealised reality which is what appeals to me the most.
["New World Man" plays]
Lee: I think, myself, in the sort of whole rhythm of the band, it's an extension of something we started a couple of albums ago which is an emphasis on feel, and being able to take all the technique that you have and apply it subtly into the feel of a song, and put the emphasis on feel first, technique second rather than the way it used to be: technique for the sake of technique. So, because the technique was good, therefore the song was good. Well, that does not equate anymore. Now it has to feel real good and the technique has to be part of that feel. I thing that's the most obvious change.
Interviewer: A lot of playing on Signals to me, deals with instead of blatant telling of facts and things, either lyrically or musically, you're dealing with suggestion and implication. Alex, when you play these days, you don't so much play a note as much as imply a whole bunch by playing one.
Peart: I think that comes with confidence and maturity in all our cases and that relates to my drumming too. Where Geddy was saying abut the period before, where technique was almost the end as well as the means. Because we were trying to prove ourselves to ourselves and our audience and to anybody that was interested, that we were improving and that we were interested in being good, and "look we could do this" to ourselves, and just trying to grow and to develop all the skills that we looked around at the other bands and musicians that we admired and wanted to live up to and wanted to grow up to. And now, we've reached the point where I think we have the confidence in what we can do, know what we can't do to steer away from, and consequently can sit back a bit and carefully space things out. So a guitar solo can be more predominantly melody rather than a display of notes, or, if I look at a drum fill, sometimes it can be for just what will work rhythmically rather than what I wanna show off this week.
Lee: I think the key word is confidence. I think in your early stages of being a band or a musician or whatever, you don't have the confidence, so you have a tendency to overstate things, to over dramatise things. And the more confidence you get in what you're doing, you realise that the effect can be just as much, if not more by, as you say, implying what you mean or restraining at a point where maybe two years ago we would bang you over the head, now we'd play back, we'd ease back on the gas pedal at that point to have a little more depth to what is going on.
["Losin' It" plays]
Interviewer: The song "Countdown", now here's a song of real personal experience as opposed to leaping out of your fertile imagination and painting a very graphic scene.
Lee: We were there to experience one of the greatest things that anyone could experience and that's the launching of the Columbia Space Shuttle. And that song is very simply a description of what we experienced. And we just tried to pay some homage to it really.
Peart: It's an interesting thing stylistically too, in that we have kind of a foot in our past there in the way that we presented it musically as a kind of cinematic approach, which is something that we've dealt with in the past, but usually in expressing a fantasy or imaginary situation. And this time we used that style which we basically left behind in most other cases, but we brought it up for this, for a very real thing, a journalistic style of lyrics this time instead of being a fantastic situation, you know, a science fiction idea or something.
Lee: Yeah, it's true, it really relates to the structure of songs like "Cygnus".
["Countdown" plays]
Lee: If you remember, the last statement off Moving Pictures was, "Everybody's got to elevate from the norm". And that's all I think we tried to do with album. We realised what had become the norm for Rush and in order to succeed in anything you have to keep changing and elevating yourself - that's all we tried to do with this, is to move on to new ground.