Greetings and salutations,
I thought it was time to check in here and deliver an update of recent goings on for all of you who have been dropping into this site regularly.
As most RUSH fans may now know we have indeed and at long last finished our latest project Vapor Trails. This concludes the single longest recording session any of us have ever been involved in.
Why did it take so long you may ask? Tough question.
Well, all I can say is that after all the personal difficulties, individual musical experiments and resultant soul searching that has gone down in the world of RUSH in the last 6 years, we needed a profound amount of time to reach a state of interaction with each other that would enable us to produce something we felt was fresh and had the kind of passionate energy worthy of signing our names to. In simple... it took us a while to "get it goin' on" !
There is also the theory that the longer you spend on a project, the harder it becomes to finish. What this means, in application, is that you have become so intimate with the material that the details stop being details, and become as important to you as any of the more fundamental parts of the song. This is commonly referred to as "loss of objectivity". But most musicians simply justify this by saying "God is in the details".
There is another thing that happens to me when I'm making a record which makes it tough to finish. That is the fact that sometimes I have such a complete image in my head of what each song should sound like, that it becomes very difficult for me to settle for anything less. So you push and push, and try to make reality match this particular "vision" of the song and all the while you are just slowly driving yourself nuts by degrees, because you start to realize that whatyou are trying to accomplish is almost impossible and what you are really after may not be the best thing for the song anyway... Just simply YOUR version of what is best for the song. And when the other guys in the band feel the same way, that's when you need a producer. Or a therapist !! Or better still, a good glass of wine!!
This is commonly referred to as "loss of perspective". (see- Working at Perfekt)
Add a few technical glitches along the way and the fact that there is about 68 minutes of music, making this c.d. by far the longest RUSH collection we have ever produced, and you have a project that took over a year to create. But after all is said and done, I think it turned out (as the Brits like to say) "a bit of awlright". We, of course, hope you agree.
In any event that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
In other developments, I'm happy and thankful to report that My Favourite Headache continues to roll along making new friends with a slow, steady pace. It is a piece of work that I remain very proud of and I look forward for a time that I can continue that avenue of expression, and my collaboration with Ben Mink and perhaps even one day "take it on the road".
Speaking of the road, most of you may now be aware of the fact that we will soon be embarking on our first tour since 1997. We are in the middle of planning this out as we speak, so I can't really tell you much about what to expect yet, other than the fact that, once again, we are planning a rather long show and we hope to play some older songs that you haven't heard in a while (if ever) as well as a bunch of new ones.
We can't go everywhere, of course, but we'll give it a shot and I hope that we will indeed meet somewhere "out there" close to where you live. Until then, I guess that's it for now.
Cheers and thanks for your continuing interest and support!
Geddy