Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist-vocalist Geddy Lee have opened up about the emotional and physical hurdles of returning to the stage, revealing how initial anxiety evolved into a renewed passion for live performance.
Appearing on the Canadian CBC Radio One show “Q” alongside Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, the iconic musicians spoke with host Tom Power to promote the new documentary “Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple“. The film chronicles the life, creative rise, and personal tragedies of late Rush drummer Neil Peart, who passed away from glioblastoma in 2020.
Currently traveling North America on their highly successful “Fifty Something” tour, the band’s revamped live lineup features drummer Anika Nilles (who previously toured with Jeff Beck) and touring keyboardist Loren Gold (The Who, Chicago).
Reflecting on his return to the road, Lifeson admitted he initially harbored significant doubts regarding his physical capabilities before ultimately embracing the massive undertaking.
“It feels fantastic, to be honest. I think all the fears that I had starting out, whether physically I would be up to it, whether my hands would work as well as I expected. Because like Geddy was saying [earlier in the interview], you wanna go beyond what the previous gig was. Once we started playing and I felt confident and good about my physical condition, I really fell in love with it. I love the songs, I love playing with Anika. Anika‘s a brilliant musician, and she’s a wonderful person. She has a great sense of humor. We’ve become really quite close in the two years that we’ve been working with her, ’cause it has been a while. So I’m really, really excited. And I have to admit that maybe perhaps I wasn’t quite so excited when it was just a concept. I had reservations about it, mostly health-related reservations. But I got my health in order, relatively. And the key was to be able to play the way I felt I needed to play. So, I’ve just fallen totally in love with it. And now I’m the guy who wants to do more gigs,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Lee expressed his profound relief and joy at his bandmate’s rejuvenated spirit, emphasizing that the inherent pressure of the “Fifty Something” tour was heavily amplified by the responsibility of honoring their late drummer.
“I know. It’s just unbelievable to hear him say that,” he added. “But it wasn’t a simple journey to get back on stage. And I know we’re not really here to talk about that; we’re here to talk about Neil. But Neil‘s presence is always there. I mean, it really is, in so many ways. We pay tribute to him during the show, of course, and I try to tell stories about him and try to give people a look behind the songs as to how they came together and what we feel about each other and him.”
“It was a very unlikely thing that we would be back to play together, and, of course, at the age that we are, which I will not say out loud, there’s a lot of fear,” Lee continued. “And what Alex is talking about is that. It’s the fear — the fear that you’re not going to be as good as you were, the fear that you’re gonna let people down. And that is not how you honor your fallen comrade by letting people down. So there was a lot of pressure on our shoulders to be as good [as], if not better than, we have ever been, and put a show together that would do his tribute justice. So that’s what Alex is talking about. You had those terrified moments.”
When discussing Peart‘s lasting spiritual presence within the band’s music and everyday life, Lee offered a poignant perspective on grief and memory.
“Well, when you lose somebody… Somebody was asking me the other day about do I believe in the afterlife, and I said, ‘Well, the afterlife is for people that are still alive.’ You create the afterlife by making that person present, talking about them, remembering them, telling stories about them. That’s how you keep them alive. For me, that’s the afterlife,” he explained.
The new documentary, “Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple“, supplements its archival footage with new studio performances of Rush classics featuring elite drummers filling Peart‘s seat, including Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Stewart Copeland (The Police), and Danny Carey (Tool).
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.
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 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.
