Geddy Lee tells Rolling Stone he was angered by Alex Lifeson‘s 2025 comment dismissing a Rush reunion as a tribute band.
Alex Lifeson ruled out a Rush reunion in January last year by saying he would rather be remembered for the “R40” tour “than returning as the top Rush tribute band”. Ten months later the band announced one. Geddy Lee has now said what he thought of the remark at the time.
Speaking to Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone, the bassist did not soften it.
“Al is great at saying one thing to your face and then saying something else in public. You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’”
He continued: “I know how he feels and how he’s felt for a long time. We’re friends first. But… when I heard this thing about the tribute? It’s like, ‘They’re your songs, motherf**ker!’ It’s not a tribute band!”
“We own those songs as much as we did with Neil. And they’re part of us,” he added. “They’re part of your soul. They’re part of your heart. And when we started playing them together again, that kind of woke up in him.”
Lifeson accepts the phrase was doing a job for him.
“Maybe I was trying to send a bit of a signal. I wanted to create this wall that I didn’t have to climb over, by saying, ‘Oh no, I don’t wanna be in a Rush tribute band,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said.
Much of that wall was physical. Lifeson had surgery to correct a hiatal hernia, and two failed operations left him with gastroparesis, a condition in which the stomach muscles fail to move food through the digestive system properly. He was nauseous for months on end. He also manages arthritis in his hands, largely controlled with medication, and has given up alcohol, smoking, gluten, lactose and processed food.
The prospect of touring in that state held no appeal. “You could feel like a hotel room is prison,” he said. “That can be a lonely place. I didn’t know if I really wanted to do that.”
The position began to shift at VivaMayr, a wellness clinic on a lake in the Austrian countryside where guests follow low-calorie nutrition programmes, receive daily stomach massage and are taught to chew each mouthful of bread forty times. Lee went along, in his words, for moral support, and found he enjoyed it despite the ban on alcohol and caffeine.
By the time the two sat down to discuss it properly, Lifeson had stopped using the phrase.
“When we sat down, this was not about being in a Rush tribute band. This is about being Rush. In one of its best forms. And that was a whole different kind of thing.”
Lifeson had used a version of it before. In a 2024 Rolling Stone interview he described the weekly sessions at Lee‘s house self-deprecatingly: “It’s funny because we sound like a really bad tribute band for the first three or four run-throughs on these things.” That was about rustiness. The January 2025 comment to Classic Rock was about the idea of a reunion itself.
He told that magazine: “It’s good to jam with friends as you get older. I need to play. Once a week I go to Ged’s — it’s in the calendar — keep my fingers moving, play Rush stuff, new jams. We do record it, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you where it’ll go.”
He added: “Some days I wake up wanting to go out and tour again and some days I don’t. For 40 years Rush included Neil, and I don’t think putting some new version together would have the same magic.”
Then the line Lee objected to: “Rush went out on a high note playing as well as ever with one of our best stage shows on ‘R40′. I guess I’d rather be remembered for that legacy than returning as the top Rush tribute band.”
The two had first played together after Neil Peart‘s death at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts in September 2022, and briefly considered taking it further. “But it didn’t work out,” Lee said. “No sense dwelling on it, just move on with your life.” Lifeson spent the following years on Envy Of None, the band he formed with Andy Curran, Alfio Annibalini and singer Maiah Wynne, who released two albums without playing live.
The “Fifty Something” tour opened on June 7 at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, the venue where Rush finished the “R40” tour on August 1, 2015. It is the band’s first road work in eleven years and the first without Neil Peart, whose place has been taken by German drummer Anika Nilles, previously a member of Jeff Beck‘s touring band. Keyboardist Loren Gold, who has worked with The Who and Chicago, was announced in February, making this the first Rush tour with more than three principal musicians. Each night runs to two sets drawn from a pool of over 40 songs.
Lee‘s voice has already forced a change of plan once this year. Two shows were postponed on July 1 after he was diagnosed with laryngitis and bronchitis.
The 2026 leg through Canada, the United States and Mexico began as 22 dates and sold out on announcement. It now stands at 58 shows across 24 cities, with more than half a million tickets sold. In February the band added South American and European dates for early 2027, their first European shows since 2013 and their first in South America in 17 years, with the run scheduled to close in Helsinki on April 10, 2027.
Lee has been clear that the road has a limit. He said earlier this month that “there are only so many gigs left” in his body and ruled out recording new Rush material.
Lee and Lifeson first played publicly with Nilles at the Juno Awards in Hamilton, Ontario in late March, performing “Finding My Way” from the 1974 debut, the only Rush album Peart does not appear on. It was their first performance billed as Rush since 2015, though the pair had appeared under their own names at tributes to Gordon Lightfoot and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.
Peart died on January 7, 2020 at 67, after a three-and-a-half-year illness with glioblastoma. His death was announced three days later. His widow Carrie Nuttall-Peart and daughter Olivia publicly backed the tour when it was announced.
