It just felt great to play them, Lee says of revisiting older tunes.
You put yourself back in the frame of mind you were when you wrote it.
And even though its many years later, youre playing it better because youre better as a player.
Credit: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
It has even more intensity.
Headlong Flight (2012)
GEDDY LEE:That came from a bunch of jam sessions.
But you have to do it in a fresh way that brings something completely new.
Im particularly proud of that song, I think its one of the best weve ever written.
We talked about John Cleese at one point.
When we released it, some rock stations wouldnt play it because it had a rap in it.
He was just having fun with his own version of that.
We were messing around, playing Christmas carols and things like that.GL:Ben went to town on it.
Wed never played it live and it has such a particular character to it.
The great thing about playing it live was you dont know what was going to happen.
You hope you get through without a horrible trainwreck.
Its exciting to break away from the regimented, rehearsed stuff we normally do.
It was so hard to get it to feel right but in the end, we clearly did.
I ended up writing the skeleton of the song on bass and drums.
I had a friend who picked us up in a Piper Aztec, a little six-seater plane.
The Morse code notifier for Toronto was YYZ.
So writing on acoustic simplifies and keeps you connected in the writing process.
2112 (1976)
GL:We thought we were really smart.
[Rush] couldnt do that now, because [were] not armed with the same naivete.
That naivete makes you a bit more audacious and great art comes from audacity.
When writing a book in science fiction there are no rules.
you might make any st up you want.
The same thing goes for us musically.
Everybody was kind of down.
Those were the bands that were big right then.
They thought we were just going to be another one of those.
And then we started smoking a lot of hash oil and we went in a different direction.
[pauses] Fooled ya!
John didnt like it.
He couldnt play it, cause it was in seven.
We were starting to get more adventurous and he was a simple rock and roll guy.
Thats how I knew, this is our guy.
