There are many levels to Neil Peart. There is the consummate professional known for his amazing skills as a drummer. There is also the shy, retiring man who wanted to be the best at what he did but decried any adulation for it. He was an introvert in the classical sense of the word and deeper still was the social critic who spun tales of the many and sundry ills of our modern world.
Above and beyond everything else he was known for, he was a writer, penning almost all of the lyrics for every Rush album from the second album right up to ‘Clockwork Angels, their final album. He was a veritable font of lyrical brilliance that seemed to have no end.
Album after album, beginning with ‘Fly By Night’, he began writing about the world around him in sometimes stark, uncomfortable terms. The early albums were filled with the imagery of fantasy and science fiction that he had devoured as a younger man with brief and beautiful paens to history interspersed as he honed his craft and his intellect grew.
His lyrical output seemed to have no bottom as he wove stories about a battle between gods in ‘Hemispheres’, a trip into a black hole with ‘Cygnus X-1’ and the dystopian future of ‘2112’.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, themes began to develop in his writing that would rise again and again. The theme of one man against the masses began to show up more and more often. His atheism came to the fore with examples of self reliance and self determination in songs like ‘Something For Nothing’ and ‘Anthem’.
He was growing as a writer and his voice was becoming more and more clear and pronounced as the years went by.
One theme that popped up time and again was that one should always be true to oneself despite the pressure to do otherwise. He did more than write about that particular belief, he lived it every day of his life. He was not content to merely pay lip service to that line of thinking, he set an example that would be the hallmark of the band’s career and the overarching characteristic of his own life.
The dichotomy of his enormous impact on music and drumming and his need to retain some sense of privacy in his own life was never more obvious than after his daughter and first wife died within a year of each other. He withdrew from life and got onto his motorcycle and just rode until his heart healed and he could come out of the shell of pain and loss that had cocooned him.
He spent five long years on his bike trying to find a way to make sense of his personal tragedies and still remain a reasonably functioning member of society and his band.
He wrote constantly during this time as a form of catharsis but also to document his own journey of healing.
He published two books from that same period that laid bare the emotion he was feeling and chronicled the miles that passed by him.
Though he was unable to think about returning to drumming and music he never stopped writing. The sheer volume of his work both in the band and away from it presents a daunting challenge to explore fully. I decided to focus primarily on the writing he did in context of the band to gain a deeper understanding of the man and how he thought and felt about the world around him.
Starting with ‘Permanent Waves’ his writing became less fantastic and more based in the reality he was exposed to on a daily basis. Coupled with the fact that the band itself had chosen to turn away from the epic albums and themes of the past, his writing became more compact and concise. He was growing as a writer and had found a new voice with which to express himself.
The song “The Spirit Of Radio” was both a fond reminiscence of the way radio used to be in the early days as well as a scathing indictment of the corporate culture that was destroying the true artistry of music.
This was a new Neil. He was saying things that mattered now, not spinning yarns as he had done in the past.
His atheism was on display in the song ‘Free Will’ and he didn’t try to mask it or give it some flowery context in which to couch it. He came right out and said what he meant,
‘You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that’s clear. I will choose free will.’
He was simply rejecting the notion of predestination for the self determination that he had touched on in earlier albums.
Speaking only for myself, I count this album as the precise moment when his maturity as a writer and social critic truly flowered and began to grow.
The very next album his voice was even stronger. ‘Moving Pictures’ exposed both the band’s music and Neil’s writing to a much wider audience. He spun one terrific yarn about a forbidden drive in a fast car in ‘Red Barchetta’ but stuck to pointing out what he saw as a furthering of the separation of humanity from itself in the songs ‘The Camera Eye’ and ‘Vital Signs’.
‘Witch Hunt’ was a dark expose’ on the dangers of groupthink and mob rule and what he saw as the worst parts of human behavior. Here was the social critic in full force, a voice that would become stronger as the years and the albums went by. ‘Tom Sawyer’ was an ode to youth in modern times. Gone was the young boy of Mark Twain's imagination. He had been replaced with a new arrogance and swagger, a youth who knew who he was and never bent to the will of others. He described in perfect detail how the youth of the early 80’s saw themselves.
“A modern day warrior mean, mean stride. Today’s Tom Sawyer mean, mean pride.”
He had captured the attitude of the youth of the time while not being critical of it per se. In much the same way Bowie had captured the spirit of the day in the song ‘Changes’ so too had Neil given a voice to the youth in the song.
It is at this point that I will end part one of this piece owing largely to the vast amount of lyrics this amazing man produced over the course of his forty years.
In part two, I will explore his later output and look closely at his ability to describe what was best and worst about the world around him.
