Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 31
“We always really care about the presentation of the whole album,” says Lifeson, when asked about the album’s booklet providing “cover art” for every song. “I mean, we are old, so we remember what it was like to have those albums, to look at it and listen to it and read the album cover, turning it over and over — it all becomes part of the process. And that’s changed over the years. I guess on iTunes you can download covers and look at them while you’re listening, so it’s getting back to that. But it’s always been important to us to provide something tangible that you can hang onto and look at. And doing a separate jacket for each of the songs — and really, just the songs with lyrics — is a nice way to provide a platform for the lyrics, first of all, to make them readable in an easy way, but it also makes for a good visual to look at while you’re getting into it. And to do the whole package with the game board and the DVD, the documentary and stuff, it’s a nice way to put the whole picture together.”
Regarding the title, Neil had also been inspired by the Hamlet phrase “slings and arrows.” Peart did some online searching to make sure his title hadn’t been used for a record before and he found Harish Johari’s Leela game board, which he then showed to Geddy and Alex. They approved of the idea, and the art was given to Hugh Syme to convert into a full-blown album cover.
Snakes & Arrows, Rush’s eighteenth album, emerged as a digipak CD on May 1, 2007, brightly colored and boldly recorded. Instantly, upon the opening movements on first track “Far Cry,” it became plain that this was Rush’s most richly analog record in terms of production tones since the ’70s. Of course, fans had already gotten the song as a taste of what was to come, since “Far Cry” was issued as an advance single on March 12 of that year. The song would reach #22 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, get the full production video treatment and be featured on every tour the band ever did moving forward, until the end.
“It’s much bolder, richer sounding,” agrees Alex on the production job, “and it’s heavier, it’s stronger, less personal. I don’t find very much in common with Vapor Trails. Maybe a couple of tracks . . . ‘Earthshine’ I could see coming out of this record. But that was a much more personal record, a much more difficult record to make, for sure. This record was just a joy. There wasn’t a single difficult time we had on this record.”
This was certainly the case with “Far Cry.” The song emerged from a particularly satisfying jam between Geddy and Alex. Neil had left some lyrics for the guys to consider, and Geddy was amazed how seamlessly Neil’s words lined up with this jammed song fragment he and Alex had just created, particularly the chorus, which Neil had highlighted. The end result is a hammering, rhythmic celebration of power trio rock, notwithstanding the extra guitar, the acoustic. Most notably though was the warmth from all corners, and no keyboards.
“We took the keyboard experiment as far as we could,” says Alex, of a transition that began in the early ’90s. “But it seemed to naturally come to an end. We found that the core of the band was the three-piece, and that’s where we wanted to go back to. It wasn’t like we said ‘no more keyboards’; it was more like let’s get back to the core and fit the keyboard stuff around. We went on from there; more guitar parts were written than keyboard parts, and I found that more rewarding. It was a lot more fun to come up with parts that were pads and atmospheric. And now, of course, we’re basically no keyboards.”
Though friction over keyboards was out of the way, tensions over sonics and textures remained on records like Counterparts and Vapor Trails. And in between, Test for Echo wasn’t fully satisfying either, both sonically and in terms of the songs, the writing. Now Rush had settled on a new sound, only hinted at on Vapor Trails, this sense of a “bashing” three-piece plus acoustic, which would carry them through to the end, Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels comprising a two-project suite.
No Wal bass either. Raskulinecz had Geddy playing his Fender Jazz, along with his Taurus pedals, which he uses on every track but two. Peart played a Drum Workshop kit and Alex used a number of guitars, but mainly a Les Paul, a Stratocaster and a semi-acoustic Gibson ES-335. But it was mainly Geddy’s use of the Fender Jazz and Neil’s lack of electronic drums that helped the band get a timeless sound, along with procedural things like partial use of takes live off the floor, all three of the guys hammering out in the room together. Nick also egged Neil on to swing and let loose, suggesting fills, resulting in the guys’ nicknaming their new producer Booujze, a moniker amusingly as hard to spell as his last name. The made-up word refers to a sound Nick used to describe a bar-ending fill he wanted Neil to do on “Far Cry,” with Nick also imploring him to go nuts over the “YYZ”-like monotone chord bits, something Peart readily agreed to.
With respect to the lyric, “Far Cry” is essentially a microcosm of the album’s composite or general theme, becoming the spokesman track. It’s the title track in all but name. Geddy instantly fell in love with the concept of “Far Cry”; it easily passed his test of something he himself could get behind. There’s negativity there, the idea that the ideals of the hippie generation failed, but also a sort of exasperated hope that one can learn to cope and “get back on.” Ills are only hinted at, ills like poverty and religious extremism, and also, poetically but so quick it can be missed, perceived ills like the electronic wiring-up of a younger generation, something that was only beginning to become an issue in 2007.
Speaking with Phil Roura, Geddy framed “Far Cry” as “full of indomitable optimism. It’s about the idealism we have for the world. It’s about what we have been given to deal with — and that’s okay.” Generally across the album, said Ged, “We wanted to reflect a lot on the issues of the day, how our lives are reflected by extreme religious behavior — both near and far away. The point Neil is trying to make in his lyrics is that it’s not just the world of Islam. Any extreme religious behavior is bad, whether it be Middle East or the Middle West. You walk through airports and see what everyday folks have to deal with. That’s the world we face. This album is more topical. The world has changed a lot in a very short period of time. There’s been a lot of conversation, a lot of books written recently about religion, of how God plays in people’s lives.”
“What does lyric writing do for me?” asked Neil rhetorically, just after the release of the album. “Self-expression, like drumming — it’s the perfect thing. And a belief that it matters, I guess. One of my dad’s maxims in life was always if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. So that drove me as a drummer, certainly, and obviously if I’m going to write lyrics, then I have to make them as good as I can. Another one of my dad’s maxims that got drilled into me big time in working at the farm equipment dealership, if he sent me off to do a job, clean some shelves or arrange the parts, then I’d come back and say, ‘There, I’ve done it; is that good enough?’ He said, ‘If it’s perfect, it’s good enough.’ So these are words to live by that, again, are clues to my character, that it would be spent in the pursuit of excellence.
“Drumming has been such an odyssey for me, an odyssey of influence and of refinement and understanding and work and practice and teaching and learning. All of that — a circle that never ended. And lyric writing is exactly the same, as I got more interested in it and learned more and read more widely and learned to understand metaphors and the rhythm of words. One thing I think is important is that being a drummer, the rhythm of words came so naturally. My drumming is very much phrase-built, in the way I like to orchestrate drum parts, in a conversational but architectural format. Words became that too, where I could focus on them in that rhythmic sense.
“And then there’s the sensibility I guess you need to have for the power of words and images and communication, of saying what you want to get across effectively. Because normally you just can’t say in as few words what the subject of the song is going to be; you gotta dress it all up. That’s the perfect analogy for drumming too. I’m not just going to play the beat; I’m going to dress it all up. So much of my life is built on the idea of ‘It’s not going to be just what I have to do — it’s going to be as much as I can do.’ That’s it. And like drumming, lyrics grew in that way too.
“I mentioned before about the conversational idea, composing a song as a conversation between people. On Snakes & Arrows, again, it’s worldly matters expressed on a personal one-to-one basis. Those are devices, but at the bottom of that, it’s still me saying this and caring enough to write about it, whether it’s inspired by anger or outrage or passion for nature. I always like to get weather into songs and I like to get nature into songs, because I love them. You know, speed . . . I’ve written about cars, I’ve written about motorcycles, because I love them too. Everything I love about drumming comes out in my drumming, and everything I love about life comes out in the lyrics. Those things are genuinely there.
“So when people do respond in that way, in a genuine way, and when people have said . . . you know the quote that I use: ‘the soundtrack of my life,’ when people have said they’ve been fans of Rush for twenty years, thirty years, through their whole lifetimes and all the changes that brings, of becoming a parent and getting a responsible job and still keep coming to our shows, that’s perfect. That kind of continuity of all the people that I look out at every night, who just have that simple joy of relating and are so glad to come and share that at a live show, with all the other people who obviously feel the same way, and to sing along and air drum along or just to be, to feel part of that spirit . . . that’s the satisfaction.
“But much larger than that is, of course, what it’s meant to their private lives. When people tell me our music or my lyrics or my books have helped them, then of course it’s a wonderful feeling. I must admit . . . honestly, I can’t even begin to deal with being an impact on anyone’s life, a positive influence on anyone. Me? Are you kidding? But it is nice. I feel that whatever influence people attribute to my lyrics or my books, they had it already. They maybe just needed the affirmation. Because I’ve had that experience, where I’ll read something and go, ‘Yeah, that’s just how I feel.’ And that affirmation, that’s worth a lot. But it’s not the same as inspiration. So what I receive back, without getting overblown about it, is just that they relate, right? And not that I elevated their lives. I don’t believe that — they elevated their lives. But if they could relate to my passion or my struggle or my anger, then it’s a sense of affirmation. Like, I have a circle of friends all over the place, and we don’t see each other a lot. But they’re a constant affirmation to me about what I do and why. Because I know there are a few people who go through their lives the same way as I do.”
Indeed “Far Cry” is as much joyous drumming as it is meaningful lyric. The imposing sense of rhythm on the song and across the album came out of the relationship with the band’s bounding new producer.
As Neil explained to Jonathan Mover from Drumhead, “I’ve seen it in studios, where multi-tracks were going by that were just tape, splice, tape, splice, tape, splice, tape, splice. I would accept that reality if we had a ten-minute song and there were two or three takes to make it up; then okay, fine. But mostly, even today, I like to feel that I can perform a good take every time, and then you look for something special.
“Like when Nick Raskulinecz would send me out to go crazy. We were both looking for the seat-of-the-pants fills, and there are some on this where you can hear the rim shot as I just barely made it, and I just barely get back to ‘one.’ And that’s so exciting; it’s not replicable. So Nick’s suggestion of capturing a good take gave me the satisfaction as a musician of having done the job right. There are two sides to that story. Yes, you can fix everything, but then the drummer feels, ‘Well, I didn’t really have very much to do with that performance.’ That has got to undermine your confidence — and your satisfaction — in the work. And all of that intangible stuff is really important in the long term: how you feel about what you’ve done and the music you’ve made. So I like to have all of that and then the delight of hearing something just so over the edge and so on the edge. You know, it gives me a smile. There are certain fills on this album and certain figures I hear that I just have to smile at, like, ‘I can’t believe I got away with that!’”
Continues Neil, on the logistics that allowed this to happen: “We were in Allaire Studios and the way we were set up, the control room was off to this side and I couldn’t see Nick. I said, ‘I want to see you. Stand over there where I can see you.’ On one track he came out and drummed along with me in the room. I could tell by his response, even looking through the glass, he’d be all vibed up. So there’s a barometer of excitement there, and a lot of times everybody knows. Everybody’s around if we’re doing the basic tracking together, and everybody’s there vibing off it or not. And I’ll come in and it’ll be like, ‘You got it!’”
“Armor and Sword” continues in this spirit of groovy drums, lots of cymbals — not to mention, at the onset, a sample of whacked sheet metal! — and three-way chemistry between players. It’s an odd one, arguably with ill-fitting parts, but it’s highly creative. What’s more, it adds to the idea that Rush is deliberately building an arcane new sound, one that will last across this record and Clockwork Angels. Neil attributes the opening polyrhythmic signature on the song to something Buddy Rich does on “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” A cover of this composition, featuring Chick Corea drummer Dave Weckl, is included on Neil’s Burning for Buddy tribute project from 1994.
Recalls Neil on “Armor and Sword,” “I remember with a couple songs done, coming in one day and we just couldn’t get anywhere. We were working on ‘Armor and Sword,’ and it wasn’t getting anywhere and I was thinking, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I suck,’ just wanting to give up and go home, and then coming back the next day, facing it again, making a little change. So your whole existence does rest on that. If you are able to imbue everything in your spirit into the job, like nothing else in the world is more important than getting those two lines of lyrics right, you will apply yourself. And finally on the third day, boom, I had a breakthrough and wrote the whole rest of that song and part of another one, ‘Far Cry.’ Yeah, that’s one that came out of that blockage. Perseverance, in that case, is what it took. Vapor Trails had a lot of hardships, but they were existential and internal. Time wasn’t part of it. And same with Snakes & Arrows — we were able to work hard and rewrite to our hearts’ content with nobody holding a gun to our heads.”
Explained Peart in the Snakes & Arrows tourbook: “While I was working on those lyrics, the battlefield imagery reminded me of a line, ‘Where ignorant armies clash by night,’ from a poem I half-remembered. It turned out to be Matthew Arnold’s magnificent ‘Dover Beach,’ and I was so excited by its synchronicity with my own preoccupations in many of these songs that I had to put in one line from the poem, as a tribute, ‘Confused alarms of struggle and flight.’
“I was also thinking,” continues Neil, “like Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, about how children are usually imprinted with a particular faith, along with their other early blessings and scars. People who actively choose their faith are vanishingly few; most simply receive it, with their mother’s milk, language and customs. Thinking also of people being shaped by early abuse of one kind or another, I felt a connection with friends who had adopted rescue dogs as puppies and given them unlimited love, care and security. If those puppies had been ‘damaged’ by their earlier treatment, made nervous, timid or worse, they would always remain that way, no matter how smooth the rest of their life might be.
“It seemed the same for children. To express that notion, I came up with, ‘The snakes and arrows a child is heir to / Are enough to leave a thousand cuts.’ I thought I was only combining Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows’ with the childhood game Snakes and Ladders, to make something less clichéd. And indeed, when we were discussing Snakes & Arrows as a possible album title, Geddy remarked, ‘I like it because it sounds familiar, but isn’t.’”
The third track on the record and arguably second most celebrated, “Workin’ Them Angels,” takes its title from something Neil overheard on his motorcycle travels. An elderly woman had been chastising her husband for driving too fast, saying he had been “workin’ them angels,” meaning testing fate, one of the themes of the record at large. The lyrics are very much about this idea but applied to Neil, given all the driving, flying and white-knuckle motorcycle touring he had been doing.
At the musical end, this one’s yet another example of Rush demonstrating enthusiastically their new hard, progressive rock proposal, bluster set dynamically against acoustics.
Explained Peart, on taking the reins and doing his own writing, in Modern Drummer: “This song shifts between 3/4 and 4/4 several times. Early on in the arranging, it was my suggestion to change the choruses to 4/4, to take the ‘lilt’ out of the song for a minute. However, once we did that I found it surprisingly difficult to feel the transition sometimes. The point where Alex and Geddy chose to make the shift from four to three, for example, sometimes made sense structurally but could be a real head-breaker for me. Still, it forced me to come up with some creative ways to bridge that change — jump that fence — like at the end of the instrumental passage, after the one-handed snare figure with tom flams on the triplets (inspired by a fill Matt Johnson played in ‘Last Goodbye,’ from Jeff Buckley’s enduringly brilliant Grace). I resorted to calling a ‘time-out’ by throwing in a pair of rumbling quadruplets with double bass and floor toms, rising to a snare flam to kick into the last verse. When Geddy heard me pulling off stuff like that, he would shake his head and say, ‘Now that’s comedy!’
