Rush is a rock band from Canada also inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The trios ninth album Moving Pictures (1981) features seven songs with lyrics written by Neil Peart, in addition to perhaps the best drum and percussion work in the band’s full stable of work in the form of the song YYZ. Come along for a ride with me with a listen to the songs of Moving Pictures by Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, the musicians of Rush.
(The album cover for Moving Pictures by Rush).
Tom Sawyer opens Moving Pictures with a rolling synthesizer riff combined with tight drumming and lyrics with a social edge. A clearly accessible and commercially friendly progressive rock play right from the start, Tom Sawyer is perhaps the most well known song from the band, if clearly from the album.
While never released as a single, Red Barchetta tells a story of daydreams, driving a tiny red car and the rolling back of the specific model of car that is the object of the narrator’s fancy.
(Left to right are Neil Peart, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush).
The instrumental YYZ offers the extended homage of percussion greatness that is the playing of Neil Peart. The letters YYZ themselves refer to the Toronto Pearson Airport in Ontario, where the band formed.
(Neil Peart of Rush).
Back when albums were released as two-sided events, Limelight was the final track on the first side of the Moving Pictures album at the time of release. The commentary within the song has a universal appeal while commenting on the notion that the fame of being a rock star comes with at a cost of losing the privacy of being the person who exists prior to fame. The song Limelight was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
(Geddy Lee of Rush).
A song lyrically inspired by the USA novels by John Dos Passos is The Camera Eye, the opening song to the second side of the Moving Pictures album. The song moves in two movements, with inspiration taken by walks in New York City and London taken by Neil Peart. In this conversation with Cleveland.com from 2011, Geddy Lee suggests that this song “didn’t age very well.”
(Alex Lifeson of Rush).
Social conscience is the message underpinning Witch Hunt. A bit understated in sound, the song holds up in calling for humility and an awareness of the abuses of assuming your own way is the one and only.
Individuality and the pressures to conform, a message of Witch Hunt, returns with Vital Signs. Played with a sensibility that aims to fuse reggae into a rock sound, the seventh and final song from Moving Pictures caps an album perhaps the most commercially successful in Rush‘s extensive catalog.
Matt – Saturday, January 11, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 