Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 23
“This was in a simple, creative, artistic sense, which Neil understood too. Geddy was uncomfortable with singing something that was very personal to Neil and would prefer to have something that was more universal. So there were a couple of times where we had discussions about that. But for the most part, the recording process went relatively smoothly, albeit long, because they had already spent nearly six months writing, and then I spent another five months with them recording.”
Northfield says there was also a sticking point between Geddy and Alex around musical preferences, stemming from what they had each experienced on their solo records.
“Yes, probably the main contradiction on Vapor Trails was that Geddy was very into melody and harmony at that time, from a writing and compositional point of view. Alex was very into aggressive Nine Inch Nails/Marilyn Manson kind of metal. And so there was Geddy maybe erring on the side of being a bit too . . . not sweet, but melodic, and Alex maybe pushing to be a bit aggressive outside of the Rush world. That was difficult, and yet at the same time they had been together for so long and they were so respectful of each other that they were trying to make that work. There were moments of great inspiration, but it was a difficult record. It didn’t seem difficult immediately, but by the time we got to the end of it, it was like wow, this has become a monster that we are trying to tame now.
“But yes, Geddy’s dominant vision was melody,” reiterates Paul. “And he was experimenting more with vocal harmonies as well, and allowing them in a way he wouldn’t have done in the past. I made a big point of emphasizing to him that I thought it was a good idea for him to go back to singing high at that time. Because over the years, he’d gradually sung lower and lower and lower. And from a point of view of trying to capture the three-piece attitude band, singing high was actually a benefit, because you could cut through. As soon as you start going lower and lower and lower, it becomes much more difficult; there’s more of a conflict to getting a vocal to be heard in a lower register.
“Some of the iconic Rush, obviously, he’s way up there. And there were times like in Hemispheres where they wrote the whole record without realizing it was really on the edge of his range, and he had a nightmare singing Hemispheres. I wasn’t part of that record, but when they came to Permanent Waves, it was like, we’re not gonna have that happen again. Gradually over the years, he kind of went down and down. And then when they decided they were looking to go back to some more raw energy, it was important to think about going back up high, not maybe into the stratosphere, but pushing it.
“He’d since worked with Ben Mink on his solo record, who is also a very strong musician, arranger and multi-instrumentalist who shares a lot of Geddy’s humor. They both have a sense of the absurd but also a similar seriousness about their music. And so when I came to work with him, he’d often have done a lot of his vocal stuff by himself. Working out the parts and working out the harmonies. And so when I was with him, we were working on computer. He said, ‘I got used to doing a lot of this by myself.’ It’s kind of like . . . not a crutch, but it’s a nice place to be, where you sit and you’re playing with the computer and listening — it keeps you occupied. There’s great value in that sometimes.
“As a bit of context, when I’m producing records, I still like to engineer things. And the main reason is, when you’re busy and occupied, you don’t feel like there’s a big pressure to say something if you have nothing to say. Because you’re involved, you’re part of the process of making the record.
“And that’s a difficult thing for a producer to do sometimes, to stay out of it. If things are going really well, you don’t need to have an opinion. You can just let things go. And so for me, when I’m producing, I like to keep my hands busy. When things seem important to say, you say something, as opposed to sitting around going, well, I haven’t said anything for the last fifteen minutes; I better have an opinion.
“Anyway, I think Geddy was feeling that he liked that, when he was working by himself — he was busy. So he said, ‘Do you mind if I do this, and you just sit there at the back and tell me if it’s good?’ Which was the exact opposite of my comfort zone. But it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, all right.’ This is a challenge, but I was up for it. So basically I had to verbally tell him what I thought. And in true Geddy fashion, like when he would do bass, he’d do maybe three takes of bass and then we’d get three we felt were good takes. He’d say, ‘I’ll play you a take and you tell me which one you like and which bits of which one.’ And he would keep playing me pieces and I had to choose. And he would either agree or disagree.
“But the amusing thing was that I wasn’t aware at the time that he was testing me by sometimes playing the same piece twice to see if I had a different opinion about it. Which is the complete reverse of the tradition of being in the studio where the producers and engineers tended to force musicians — with Rush, particularly around Moving Pictures — to play things again and again and again, to get the perfection. And punching in again and again, to the point of absurd, sometimes.
“And it was almost like revenge,” chuckles Paul. “Because suddenly Geddy was able to play the same performance back and see if I had the same opinion all the time. And I’m somewhat proud that I think I actually managed to survive that test. He said to me after a couple of days of doing that, ‘You’re pretty good; I’ve been testing you.’ He’s very sharp and he’s watching out for bullshit, if you like, in the technical or musical department or whatever. He’s got his eye out for people trying to pull the wool over his eyes.
“My take on Geddy was that when everything is going very smoothly, and everybody appears to be doing the job he expects they’re going to do, he’s a very relaxed and humorous guy. But at any moment, if he gets the sense that somebody’s not on, not doing the job or not paying attention, he very quickly changes and becomes quite intense. It’s a shocking change. You go from joking around and then suddenly, ‘Oh, okay.’ There’s a sudden real seriousness that comes into his interaction with people. Fundamentally, he likes to joke around, but if at any point he doesn’t feel like things are being done properly, he’s the first person to turn up the heat. And fortunately, most of the time I worked with him and those guys, I was a pretty diligent guy. But there were occasionally times when you’d get a little loose about what you’re doing, and suddenly it’s like, you know.”
Emerging out of the darkness on May 14, 2002, Vapor Trails would prove to be a very different kind of Rush album — rough, frazzled, fuzzy, noisy, claustrophobic, laden and leaden with meaning. The full arsenal is used directly at the opening salvo. First there’s Neil with a novel rhythm, just like on Counterparts. Next Alex does his best Dick Dale — quickly two tracks of it — while Geddy enters gloriously bassy of tone, perfectly meshing with Neil’s booming bass drums. Ergo “One Little Victory” starts twice but with the same theme, more focused and purposeful than so many Rush songs that start twice or three times, often without logic to the stitching. A couple of waves of the surf theme soon give way to a considerably heavy riff that hits that place between British blues boom and doom, last heard on “What You’re Doing” and “Working Man,” something that will return again in a few hot spots on Clockwork Angels.
An apt opener and a sensible enough lead single (there’s a conceptual and sonic uniformity across the album that means all the songs are candidates — and none at the same time), “One Little Victory” begins the record on a hopeful note, before moody introspection sets in. This whole record is a latticework of little victories, one supporting the next, carrying forward into touring again and yet more records. The choice of this song for the pole position also makes sense given it’s a bit of a showcase for Neil. Even if he cites a certain amount of “anger and confusion” in the part, he really cooks up something interesting, using double bass drum as an extra treat. The plan was for Neil to insert this part at the back end, but Geddy cajoled Neil into opening the record, solo-style. Also, as Paul alluded to, Geddy unpacks his high register, singing the first verse middling and then jumping an octave for the second push.
Geddy continues unpacking for the long haul come “Ceiling Unlimited,” where he plays bass chords as well as some bass harmonies. Up-tempo rock like the opener, in this one Alex is characteristically textural, with Neil bashing away and Geddy not plonky but simply emitting tone. Bass players usually really dislike when their articulation is missing, and indeed there was so much regret about the mix of the album that it came in for a rare remix, with Vapor Trails Remixed issued on September 27, 2013, complete with new cover art, mixed by modern prog maven David Bottrill.
Add the title of this one to Neil’s suite of weather titles, even if the song itself is not about weather. It means, essentially, very thin cloud cover, a term Neil picked up while on the tour bus with the TV tuned to the weather channel. Peart’s lyric for the song is jam-packed with concepts for pondering, much of it societal, balanced (in the booklet, literally) against inscrutable lines that could apply to his remarkable circumstances.
Alex continues to explore where he fits across the layers of Rush’s now re-densified sound, picking individual notes as he often does, plus hitting chords.
“It gave me the opportunity to explore areas of the guitar I could use for textures, the sorts of things the keyboards used to do in the past,” says Lifeson. “And I love that; it’s fun to make that instrument sound unlike how it’s supposed to sound. And that’s what we did with Vapor Trails. It’s always the most recent record that sits best with you, but even trying to be as objective as I can, it’s probably my favorite record that we’ve done.”
Still, as Alex explains, the record emerges as downright inscrutable, with respect to its relationship with the guitar. “The direction I really wanted to go in for this record was a very anti–rock guitar direction. Geddy plays a lot more chordal stuff, and that comes from his solo record. He wrote a lot of those songs on bass. You play chords to sing along to, and he naturally gravitated toward that style. And when he would do things like that, it took me somewhere else. I could play single-note lines, play more of a bass part when he was playing more of a rhythm guitar part. So we were changing roles and that interested me; I really like trying to go in through the back door if I can.”
At the lyric end, Neil gorgeously and with discipline describes his motorcycle-mounted healing process, creating a soundtrack song to his celebrated book, in progress at the time. Reflects Alex, “Everything had so much weight to it, every note and every idea, and of course the writing lyrically was very therapeutic for Neil. It was an opportunity for him to get a lot of stuff out of his system. And in many ways he’s very honest, as he was in Ghost Rider, the book he wrote about his feelings and the things that were happening around him. He’s a very private guy, and he spoke very openly about those very private issues he has, which he usually holds very close.”
Ghost Rider serves as a microcosm of a wider album that feels like it needed to be written, art that was screaming to come out despite the difficulty of its birthing. If in the past, records might have been made just because Rush are responsible adults and they need to make stuff, the whole of Vapor Trails feels like a work of art, one that is conceptually purposeful even from a musical point of view. In other words, it marks a shift in direction, one too fragile and arcane ever to be repeated. It’s an odd song though, but one that works, thanks to an urgency from Alex on hard-rain guitar, with Geddy passionate and pushing air, Neil bashing along with open hi-hat, hitting lots of cymbals, leaning into spirited fills. And yet there’s a strong melody. You might almost think it’s some kind of post-punk ballad from 1983.
“‘Peaceable Kingdom’ is one of my favorites because I think it’s a great example of all these different elements, of shifts in tempo and shifts in rhythm and of melody,” notes Alex. “For me what was important was to get the guitar to sound dissonant at times, and very rich harmonically, with a lot of noise going on in the background of whatever the melody was, counterpoint as much as possible to what Geddy was playing and sometimes to what Neil was playing, not only in terms of rhythm, but also in terms of texture and melody.
“Almost all of ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ is from that one jam we did, then we made the song up from that, added a couple little embellishments, the drums of course. But basically guitar and bass are from that one time — that’s the one time it was played. I really love that idea.”
When asked to clarify whether this means that much of the record comes from live interaction between Geddy and himself, Alex says, “Well, I wouldn’t say almost all of them, but at least half, in terms of performance. Generally, Geddy and I would jam for three days. And then we would spend a couple of days compiling, weeding out the crappy stuff from what we thought was good, and then from there, we would start assembling songs. The deal was, if we could better the performance, great, if we can’t, fine. And songs like ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ had a certain feel and energy to them. You know, you get into the studio and start playing, and you start thinking about it too much — everything is like that — and it becomes a little safe. When you’re not thinking and just playing, it’s coming from a different place; you don’t care and it just goes. And it’s a beautiful reflection of where you’re at that very moment. That’s what I love about it.”
Again, there’s a through line from things tried on previous songs, Geddy singing moderately high (albeit, back in the mix, smeared by open hi-hat and his own bass chords), along with some really heavy caveman rock, only achievable when the bass is this low of frequency, and Neil pounds away freely like he would on Clockwork Angels.
The artful and understated tarot card theme Hugh used for the CD booklet (contrasted against his gratuitous image-barfing on Test for Echo and Counterparts) reveals the “Tower” card as we arrive at “Peaceable Kingdom.” Indeed, this one has Neil addressing the then-recent September 11 terrorist attacks. Hard hitting, action packed and opaque, there’s even a plot of real estate on which to underscore the album’s tarot card theme.
“The Stars Look Down” keeps up the side in terms of the band creating a helluva din. There are backward guitar parts, acoustic massaged in, obscure bass chords, but the river running through it is fat bass, Alex with lots of electricity and Neil bashing away hitting lots of cymbals. “This started with Alex and me just riffing together in a funky way,” Geddy explained to Bass Player’s Karl Coryat. “When we hit the chorus, everything changes; I go into a finger-picking bass chord pattern, with three or four chords that circle around. He joins me at the end of the song, doing the same thing on nylon-string acoustic, which makes for an interesting orchestration.”
The title of the song comes from an A.J. Cronin novel from 1935 (and the attendant 1939 film), but it’s really just a jumping-off point. Again, Neil is cryptic with the point he’s making across the verses, but the chorus is pretty clear, Peart looking at an unresponsive cosmos and asking, “Was it something I said?” and “What are you trying to do?”
“How It Is” is a curious one, a left turn. Structurally, we’re back to Roll the Bones and Presto, or My Favorite Headache, given the song’s load of melody emphasized by soft strumming from Alex. Yet the verse is somewhat new wave, recalling the band’s ardent explorations of ’80s bands finding new and somewhat antithetical ways to combine guitar, bass and drums. As Geddy told Coryat, “This song fell together easily; the melody just popped out of my mouth and worked well with the lyric. But every time we tried to ‘produce’ it, we lost something, so we decided it was best to go back and work with the original jams that inspired the melody. Alex added some mandola in the beginning and middle, but overall this tune was a ‘jam to disc.’ I just tried to find the busiest, angriest bass riff for the verses — a bit over the top — to contrast the chorus’ sweet, melodic nature.”
This song contains one of many nods to literary sources for Neil, who itemizes a few of these in the Vapor Trails tourbook. “Lyrically, no overall concept emerged, but I can trace some interesting sources for particular lines, like Thomas Wolfe in ‘How It Is’ (‘foot upon the stair, shoulder to the wheel’) and ‘Ceiling Unlimited’ (Wolfe’s title Of Time and the River and looking at a map of the Mississippi Delta suggested the ‘winding like an ancient river’ lines). ‘Ceiling Unlimited’ also offers a playful take on Oscar Wilde’s reversal of the Victorian lament, ‘drink is the curse of the working class,’ while Joseph Conrad’s Victory gave the ‘secret touch on the heart’ line. ‘There is never love without pain’ echoed from my own experience and the novel Sister of My Heart, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and W.H. Auden and Edward Abbey (Black Sun) influenced certain lines in ‘Vapor Trail.’”
Continuing with his method of essentially creating the official statement on albums as they got toured, Neil explained that “an article in the magazine Utne Reader called ‘What Do Dreams Want?’ contributed to my ideas in ‘Nocturne,’ as well as the enigmatic mantra, ‘The way out is the way in’ for ‘Secret Touch.’ And I was also struck by a psychologist’s approach to analysis and dream interpretation, ‘without memory or desire.’ The nineteenth-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks painted no less than sixty versions of the same biblical scene, ‘Peaceable Kingdom,’ while a series of works by Canadian painter Paterson Ewen helped to inspire ‘Earthshine.’”
The record’s (almost) title track moves musically like a combination of “One Little Victory” and “Test for Echo,” one part surprisingly leading to the next, tribal drumming coming out of nowhere, sophisticated melody and counter-melody tickling the senses. Incidentally, one might wonder, why not the Canadian and British spelling of “vapour”? It was Neil’s decision to go with the shorter U.S. spelling, where both Geddy and Alex would have readily gone with vapour. The same issue emerged with Geddy’s solo album, where the decision was made to go with “Favourite” for copies sold in Canada and the U.K. and “Favorite” for copies sold in the States.
