Listen to the Neil Peart interview

The way Rush drummer Neil Peart sees it, the band’s first 20 years and 19 albums have been “a pretty linear upward climb in learning the craft.”

“Right up through the first six albums, we were concentrating on learning to play our instruments,” he says. “The songs were vehicles to experiment on, handle time signatures and different sorts of musical changes.

“Then we got more interested in songwriting from, say, Permanent Waves (1980) on. That became of interest to us and we concentrated a lot of that. The musicianship then came into the service of the song. Later in the ’80s, arrangements became paramount to us, starting with Power Windows (1985) and Hold Your Fire (1987).

“From then till now, we’ve been trying to do that all at once. The records that we’ve made since that time have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to juggle all those things at once.

“But our records are made so intuitively that they’re bound to be uneven. There’s no way I think we will ever create a masterpiece because we are so willing to experiment and give some new direction the benefit of the doubt.”

The willingness to experiment inside a familiar framework has earned Rush a wildly loyal following, particularly in the United States and the band’s native Canada.

While other progressive-rock groups from the ’70s died off, the trio of Peart, bassist/singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson stay together and play on. They make a new record just about every year and just about every year they tour, playing arenas around the world. They’re at Market Square Arena tonight.

Fascinated with mysteries

Rush knows its fans will be there; the fans have come to expect Rush to deliver the goods. Rarely are either disappointed. Of the group’s 19 albums, 12 have sold more than 1 million copies.

The band’s latest disc is Counterparts (Atlantic Records), which continues Peart‘s recent lyrical fascination with existentia mysteries of the universe.

Rush’s previous album, Roll the Bones, questioned life’s randomness. On Counterparts, Peart toys with the dictionary definition of the title – that things can be duplicates yet opposites. That goes for races and sexes as well.

If there’s a common theme among the songs, it’s the question that Peart poses on Cut to the Chase: “What kind of difference can one person make?” He answers that on Everyday Glory by writing, “Though we live in trying times/we’re the ones who have to try.”

The song Nobody’s Hero glorifies small but heroic actions by everyday people. Peart holds up as examples the first  omosexual he knew – “He set such a great example of what gay people can be and prevented me from ever becoming homophobic” – and a murder victim’s family.

Good examples

“A true role model,” Peart says, “can be people in the Nobody’s Hero sense – a few schoolteachers that I had, a few musicians I worked with in early years who set examples for me that I continue to live by – even though they weren’t Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson.

“Those are the examples I was trying to hold up, that what America and the Western world needs is not these kind of semi-deified heroes at all. We just need good examples in our neighborhoods when we grow up.” The song Alien Shore talks about people respecting each other’s differences. “We’re the same, but different,” Peart says. “I thought, that’s beautiful and self-evident. Among my friends, that’s an accepted reality. But the chorus line of the song comes back around:But that’s just us.’ “

Peart says he likes to write lyrics that “invite people to think.” “I never worry about being too complicated or too deep,” he says. “I just take for granted that, if we can think of this and it gets us excited, then other people can understand it and it might get them excited too.”

Yet no matter what Peart says or how directly he says it, he knows that some people will misinterpret his words. He recounts a radio show in which a caller argued that Nobody’s Hero was saying that “it was time for us to stop making heroes of AIDS victims and homosexuals and victims of domestic abuse, and that I was saying that these people really  aren’t anybody’s hero,” Peart says.

“The commentator said, `I think you’ve got them confused with the other Rush – Limbaugh.’ “