Episode 120. Earthshine

Come, join Chaz and Schatz on your very own VIP experience with Ray Wawrzyniak! Ray is a Rush historian, collector, author, podcaster, and longtime fixture in the Rush community. And lately, he’s added another line to the résumé: life on the road with Rush. After twelve shows on the current tour—and counting—Ray joins the boys fresh from Montreal to talk about his unlikely gig as docent of the Xanadu VIP Lounge, what it’s like watching this version of Rush night after night, and what you begin to notice when you’ve seen Geddy, Alex, Anika and Loren do this thing you never thought you'd ever even see again at all.

But with Ray, the story goes back much further.

There’s the Rush collection. The tour books. The artifacts. The stories behind the artifacts. The people he’s met along the way. His decades spent documenting the band and its history. And now there’s Why Rush Matters, his new podcast with Jeff Myers—because apparently what the world needed was another Rush podcast.

We agree.

Then Chain Lightning puts Ray’s encyclopedic Rush brain to considerably less scholarly use.

THIS WEEK’S SONG

Earthshine.

The Vapor Trails heavyweight gives Ray plenty to work with. The guys dig into that enormous riff, the difficult road the song took during the making of the album, its place in Rush’s return after tragedy, and the lyrical thread Ray hears connecting “Earthshine,” “Spindrift,” and “Seven Cities of Gold.”

And when it comes time to decide whether “Earthshine” is living in the limelight or being wished well?

Ray does not require much deliberation.

Plus Schatz’s Scratch List, our sponsors, Corey Morrissette with the Boneless roll call, and a whole lot of Rush conversation with a guy who has spent a lifetime collecting not just the stuff—but the stories.

Why are we here?