Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 16
“You might get a different answer from Neil,” explains Geddy, on the titular concept, “but for me, it’s a call and response. You know, ‘Is anybody out there?’ And not only in the sense of outer space. It’s like that phrase Will Ferrell used in that movie, ‘Am I taking crazy pills?!’ You know, am I the only one who sees the insanity in this? It’s a little bit about that, and it’s a little bit about, ‘Is anybody listening?’ For me, that’s what the song says. It’s like a view of things that are happening in our culture through the eyes of the instant media that we get, and the things we see that are not right. And yet it’s still going on, still exploited. It’s about a lot of things, but to me, it’s an out of control media culture thing.”
As Neil explained to storied Toronto journalist John Sakamoto, the concept explored on the title track cleverly ties in with the cover art. “I was up in Yellowknife last June on a motorcycle trip across the country, and [there was an] inuksuk above the town, overlooking it, and I was quite taken with it. I bought a postcard almost exactly the image you see on the cover, although this one’s been carefully made to incorporate the other elements. I just came back with this postcard and I thought of ‘test for echo.’ I thought, that’s exactly what these men mean when you’re out in the wilderness. I had a friend who was hiking out in Baffin Island and he told me when you’ve been hiking for a few days and you come across one of these things, it’s such an affirmation that there’s life out there. Again the same thing: it’s an echo; the word inuksuk means ‘in the likeness of a man,’ and that’s the feeling a traveler in the Arctic would get, that it was a sign of life. The same with the satellite dishes. I was kind of referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the test for echo going out that way.”
“Is there anybody out there?” wrote Peart in the album’s tourbook, adding to the explanation. “That’s what the title is all about. Everybody needs an ‘echo,’ some affirmation, to know they’re not alone. Sometimes that can be life’s most precious discovery — somebody out there who feels the way you do. You ask yourself, ‘Am I crazy?,’ ‘Am I weird?’ and you need some affirmation: the echo. While the answer to those questions may still be ‘Yes!’ it’s good to know that you’re not the only one. You are not alone. And we’re not either. During the making of this record, my partners Geddy and Alex posted some goofy ‘inspirational slogans’ on the walls of the studio. Like this one: ‘Individually, we are a ass; but together, we are a genius.’ Like most inspirational slogans, it’s hyperbolic (and goofy), but expresses a humble truth. Another previous discovery to make in life: we do our best work together. And have the most fun too (that’s the ‘genius’ part).”
Alex, who plays a Les Paul Custom on the song, quite likes “Test for Echo,” calling it “quirky” and “pure Rush.” “There is something very energetic about that record from a rhythmic point of view,” he adds. “There were quite a few songs in it that had that frenetic energy, things where we tried to be quite heavy and hard, and that was an offshoot from Victor.”
“Driven” opens with a sinister, circular all-metal riff by Alex, but then the band temper it with a jazzy beat and some octave work from Geddy on bass. There’s also a stark bit of acoustic come the pre-chorus, and then a chorus that’s a strange melding of pop-punk and a kind of Spanish vibe — the acoustic feels vaguely Spanish guitar as well. There’s also a completely unrelated heavy, doomy break, which is underscored by modulation and then textured with some aggressive, counter-rhythmic noise making from Alex. Neil counters the heft of the central premise as well with his ride cymbal off-beats, something that was becoming a signature of his in the ’90s. Alex framed what Neil was doing here as behind the beat, reflective of his training with Freddie Gruber. Lifeson says he and Geddy had to adjust what they had in mind after Neil added his parts, but the general feel was taken from the title “Driven.”
There’s also modulation of earlier themes, a double-speed run at the chorus and then finally at the end, the full muscle car version of the original super-heavy premise, with Geddy and Neil rocking as hard as Alex, who also adds a layer of rip-snortin’ guitar noise.
Comments Geddy, “Alex didn’t have that frustration he had on the previous records of making that guitar statement. There were certain songs, like ‘Driven,’ for example, where I was experimenting and writing all these bizarre parts for it and putting it together, and I think the first time during the writing or arranging of the song, Alex actually left the room for a while and said, ‘You know, I’m just going to chill.’ He came back and I’d kind of put this crazy song together and he got involved in it. There was a confidence, a relaxed attitude he had. I think he was happy to share the responsibility. That whole Victor experience was so good for him. He had so much control there, but he was happy to share the control again, you know what I mean? I remember the writing session was amiable; we had a lot of fun. I’m not sure it’s the best work, but there are some good songs on there.”
“Just from a bass player’s point of view,” Geddy told Paul Myers, “I wrote that song with three tracks of bass. I brought it to Alex and said, ‘Here’s the song; I did three tracks of bass but I just did it to fill in for the guitar.’ And he said, ‘Let’s keep it with the three basses.’ So I said, ‘I love you.’ It was really nice to have the blessings of my bandmates to put three tracks of bass on it. I mean, who lets a guy do that in this day and age?” Geddy characterized his part as the root, a harmony, and then more of a bass frequency — the effect is something that sounds like bass chords.
“On ‘Driven,’ I think, Geddy’s bass line arrives, and I kept pushing him. That is how I see my role,” continues Collins. “I could push Geddy to come up with stuff that he wouldn’t normally come up with. We would have a space for a bass part: ‘Geddy, could you be more interesting?’ I would challenge them. I wouldn’t say, ‘What you need to play should be B-flat in the third beat of the fifth bar’ or whatever. I would say, ‘Do something extraordinary,’ and he would do it. The same with all the other guys. They love to be challenged, they love to be pushed, and if I saw an opportunity for it, I would dive in.”
Next up is “Half the World,” which represents the mean, median and average of the record, since it straddles between electric and acoustic guitars — a dreamy hemisphere of electricity — and blends alternative rock with alternative pop. It’s probably the record’s most conventionally constructed song, with not too many sections or surprises and Neil only keeping the beat!
As Geddy told Paul Myers, defining the word straddling, “‘Half the World’ is one of our finest moments as songwriters as far as writing a concise song without being wimpy or syrupy. It’s got a little bit of everything — nice melody, and yet it’s still aggressive. It’s hard for us to write that kind of song, really. You’d have to go back to ‘Closer to the Heart’ to find an example of that.”
“I guess in one way that song does relate to what ‘Hemispheres’ is about,” says Geddy, addressing the “counterpart” duality of the lyric, “although ‘Hemispheres’ was more overtly introspective. ‘Half the World’ is more of a camera eye visual of the world. It relates in the same fashion. I love this song, I love the melodies of it, I loved writing it. To me, this is one of the types of songs I really like working with. Rush is always torn between its more complex, aggressive side and its softer side. Even though this song is not soft, it’s melodic, so I put it in that other category. To me, this is one example where I think we were able to marry slightly edgier sound with that nice, melodic thing, so I was really pleased with this song.”
You can hear in that answer why we got — and what we got with — My Favorite Headache.
“I think we found a comfort zone and pulled back a little bit,” reflects Alex, locating that same sentiment. “I don’t think we pushed it over the top like we could have. And I don’t know why that happened. I don’t know if it was possible or if it was Peter, or just the condition of recording and the way we were feeling. But something did happen that we didn’t quite take it over the top on that record.”
The studio was a world of wonders, resulting in a Middle Eastern instrument applied to one of the song’s middle verses. “Yes, he had a barely workable Mellotron too, which I had to fiddle with a lot actually,” recalls Lifeson. “It was in terrible shape. That was such a cool studio. That guy who ran that place bought all this old gear, a very wealthy guy. Over the kitchen, I don’t know, he must’ve had two hundred guitars. Acoustics dating back to the ’20s and every model of electric guitar you can imagine. I used a bouzouki that he had there, oh, and some old organ amp . . . not a Farfisa, but a little amp that was designed for an electric organ. It had some really cool sounds and a really cool character to it. I think we actually blew it up. It was old and cheap but it was very cool. I mean, he had violins there and all kinds of instruments, a sitar.
“I just wanted to try it,” said Alex, speaking with Allstar. “So I just futzed around to get a feel for it, and it changed the whole personality of the song. I remember Ged when he first heard it was like, ‘Whoa, I don’t know about that.’ It was so unusual for a Rush song to have that kind of texture, but it grew on him really quickly. I think it’s probably his favorite part of the album.”
“This was the first time we’ve had any time left after we’ve finished an album,” agreed Geddy, in the same chat, “so I was still sitting down in the studio cutting it up and editing it and playing around. But then I would change it ’til my dying day — I’m always looking for that perfect arrangement. And how do you know when you’ve got the perfect arrangement for a Rush song? It’s such a weird arrangement anyway. You can’t judge it by conventional standards. It’s why having a release date is a really important thing, because it gets it out of my hands.”
Artists never finish a project — they just abandon it.
“Though when we do finish an album, I’m really high on it to a certain degree. But I’m also really pissed off at it because it didn’t go exactly where I heard it go in my head sometimes. That’s partially due to the democratic process, and partially due to the fact that it takes six months to make a bloody album, so by the time you’ve finished it you’ve already gone somewhere else.”
Speaking with John Sakamoto, Neil said, “In the case of ‘Half the World,’ there was a line I ran into somewhere that said, ‘Half the world hates what the other half is doing,’ and I just thought it was beautiful, that one line. In many cases, there is one little quote or one line that the whole thing is built from, and they probably reflect a period of sensitivity to what’s going on around me. So the thread that you’re chasing there may exist, but I certainly wasn’t conscious of it.”
As for the acoustic guitar so richly layered into this one, “That was just my taste,” shrugs Peter Collins. “I started moving into the singer/songwriter world of production, and I just wanted to hear them, for this particular record. I thought it would be a good character change for the record. I wasn’t going to insert acoustic guitar where it wasn’t appropriate, but I thought where there was an opportunity, let’s do it — just a natural-sounding acoustic; I wanted to get back to it.”
Very much so, “The Color of Right” is another one of these alternative electric pop songs that is neither here nor there, but I’m pretty sure Kevin Shirley wouldn’t approve. Verses with no beat, with Neil sitting it out — it’s happened a lot since Power Windows and it happens here. As a compromise — lots of compromising on Test for Echo — it’s only half the verse, half the world. There’s no acoustic guitar, only electric, although Alex chimes a bit, picks a bit — can a song be politely loud? A keyboard wash is a bit distant. Neil’s lyric is inscrutable, or rather, the stuff of hemispheres, relationships versus science, or the metaphysical versus the physical.
“Time and Motion” is one of the great Test for Echo songs, full up with integrity, more “Double Agent” and King Crimson than “1979” and Collective Soul or Garbage. It’s not far off Soundgarden, though it’s more mathematical. It’s definitely one for us nerds. It’s a song that originated a few years before the sessions and was rejected and reworked. Born of the lyric first, it finally emerged here as a favorite of Geddy’s, even if it sounds more like something off of Victor. Opening themes are returned to at the end, but the last verse finds Peart doubling up on the beat, like in “Driven.”
As Neil told John Sakamoto, “A friend of mine once wrote me a letter saying that he’d realized life wasn’t about how much you could get out of a day, but how much you can pack into it. And I thought that was really cool and I used that of course in the song ‘Time and Motion’: ‘Like boxcars in a train / Fill them up with precious cargo.’”
“Time and Motion” houses what is perhaps Alex’s coolest guitar solo since the Grace Under Pressure album’s many. Carnal, slashing, noisy like Alex should be, but just perfect in its short space. Peter Collins figures, “Alex, to me he’s Alex ‘Nugget’ Lifeson — you would get from him a little gold nugget of fantastic stuff, which sometimes you had to mine out of the gold field. Geddy was also great at doing brilliant stuff — you had to just look and it was there. Alex would just be free to play, and then Alex and I would go gold mining for those nuggets. I thought that was a very workable process, and I didn’t sense any resistance from Alex. But Alex would come in and listen to what we compiled, and if he didn’t like something, then we would have another option. But he needs to explode and just be Big Al.
“Ged would get involved, but I don’t remember Neil getting involved in the guitar solos,” continues Collins. “Neil and I and Alex would be involved in the vocal comps of Geddy, and I don’t know if Rupert was the same, but I had Geddy leave the room when he comped, and he would come around and have a listen, and if he didn’t like it, we would go back in. But I don’t remember Neil being there on the guitar parts, to be honest with you.
“Sometimes Alex will do very abstract stuff, some of which works and some of which doesn’t. The fact that he is mentally free to just have a stream of consciousness in terms of his guitar playing is a beautiful thing — I loved it. It was time consuming but very well worth it. Geddy could hear things that I didn’t think were going to work at all, but by the time they were assembled, it made perfect sense. Geddy had a good vision of how to assemble those nuggets.”
This modern-day analysis from Peter lines up well with the way Alex himself saw it back in 1996. Speaking on his tendency to just play and see what works, he says, “That’s something I recognized in myself, but the other guys recognized that in me as well. I think they feel it’s my job, when we’re writing, to be aware of that. And they expect it from me. I could come up with a riff or something spontaneous and then Ged could take it someplace else. And that’s the reason Rush works so well. Those connections this time around seem much more fluid and cleaner than they have in the past. The music sometimes tends to sound a little chunky. There’s much more flow to the material this time around.
“During the Signals era I felt frustrated, but it was my fault,” continues Lifeson, sort of charting a brief history of how he arrived at his place in the mix circa Test for Echo. “I should’ve stood up for what I felt. In all fairness, we were trying different things, experimenting more with keyboards, which were relatively new. That whole technology was new and how you applied it was new. I certainly didn’t want to feel closed-minded about it. In retrospect, Signals was one of my least favorite records for a lot of reasons, and not just because the guitars were weak.
“The period with Power Windows and Hold Your Fire was elaborate. I changed my guitar sound around that time, going for a thinner, spikier sound. Part of that was because I couldn’t fit into the same range the keyboards were in. We made the mistake of doing the keyboards before doing the guitars, only because of convenience. We were doing beds in England, and I was left with this very dense material that I had to fit the guitar into. And I thought I was one of the key people here. I was used to going into the studio with thirty percent prepared and doing everything on the day, and that was part of the fun of recording. That kind of density to the music didn’t allow that approach anymore, so I had to prepare myself much better.
“The last few records we’ve done, I’m much more prepared when I go in. I have all my parts worked out. I have a very clear map of where things are going to go and if they’re going to work. We can experiment a little bit on the day, but I have a much clearer picture of the material. Now they feel that the guitar parts are already done. That’s because I’ve come out of my project with more confidence and a better idea of how I want to assemble everything before actually recording. It’s certainly a great pat on the back that the guitar parts are as strong as they are.”
With “Totem” we are back to the happy, hummable but somewhat electric vibe of “Driven,” “Half the World” and “The Color of Right,” only now there’s more acoustic guitars and another evocation of a Celtic vibe. Agrees Alex, speaking with Canadian Musician, “The choruses in ‘Totem’ are really interesting. I created a soundscape by using harmonics with a kind of Celtic melody over it that’s quite distant. In the song, in terms of dynamics, it’s a really beautiful shift. Listening to it in cans, there’s this line, ‘angels and demons inside my head,’ that was very visual to me — it’s almost angelic. You can sort of see this imagery swirling around. I wanted quite a different character to the way I approached the guitars this time. I really wanted to combine acoustics with heavy electrics. I wanted the rhythmic aspect of the guitars to stand out a bit more. I used it quite a bit as kind of a flavor for the whole record. I think there are only about three or four songs that we used keyboards in; the rest is just guitars.”
