Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Rush

On this edition of Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Armando Venditti — host of The Music Den on YouTube, joining us from Edmonton — comes back to the show to take on a band that is practically a Canadian institution: Rush. It starts in August 1968 in Willowdale, a suburb north of Toronto, with three high-school kids playing Cream covers in church basements. Six years later, four days after original drummer John Rutsey walked out, a bookish young man from St Catharines named Neil Peart — lately selling farm equipment parts for his father — turned up to audition in shorts, in a battered Ford Pinto, with his drums in rubbish bags — and a scrappy bar-rock trio became something else entirely. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Peart went on to spend forty-one years and forty-two million albums writing about totalitarian futures, Coleridge and suburban despair, in time signatures you need a pencil to count, with no line-up changes and not the faintest interest in what anyone else was doing. Peart died in January 2020; this year Lee and Lifeson took the name back out on the road for the Fifty Something tour, and the songs turn out to have lost nothing at all.

Armando's five run from 1977 to 1987 — precisely the decade Rush turned from the last of the great progressive-rock epics into a synthesiser band with one foot on the radio — and this episode carries a little extra history to join the dots between them. We open with "Subdivisions" from 1982's Signals, the suburban-alienation anthem that Alex Lifeson has never entirely forgiven the mix for burying his guitar under; then "Distant Early Warning" from Grace Under Pressure, a Cold War broadcast named after the radar line strung across the Canadian Arctic, complete with a Dr. Strangelove homage in the video. "Tom Sawyer" needs no introduction, though it's worth knowing the band thought it was the worst thing on Moving Pictures until the mix rescued it. Then the deepest and oldest cut, the title track of 1977's A Farewell To Kings, its classical guitar intro recorded outdoors in a Welsh farmyard with the birdsong left in. And we finish on "Time Stand Still" from Hold Your Fire — the first Rush song ever to feature another singer, Aimee Mann, who was paid two thousand dollars and cheerfully admits she barely knew the band, and who walked out on stage in Los Angeles in June to sing it with them again, thirty-nine years on. Here's the lovely thing about Armando's list, which we save for the end of the hour: four of his five are album opening tracks, and the fifth is track two. This isn't a greatest-hits run — it's five opening statements, the songs Rush chose to greet you with. Have a listen and let Armando make the case.

The live performance of La Villa Strangiato Armando mentioned:

https://youtu.be/eK1hmDpa8bo?si=RyhBdnPAP_Bf0uId

Broadcast 26 August 2026