Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson plan to pay tribute to their late drummer, Neil Peart, during their upcoming Fifty Something tour, and in an interview with the Brazilian TV show Fantástico, they share some insight into how they plan to do that.
“Well, we’ve been talking about certain songs that we feel really, really give us the vision of Neil,” Lee says, noting, “twice a night we will pick a song to play sort of for him and we’ll present a visual tribute behind us, to Neil, whether it be to his lyrics or just to his playing or whatever.”
He adds they’ll “take a moment, you know, play these songs with him in mind, so the whole audience and us can remember him.”
Lifeson calls the tribute “a celebration of who he was as a person and a drummer, not so sad anymore.”
Drummer Anika Nilles will be sitting in at the drum kit in place of Peart, who died in 2020, and Lee and Lifeson say they considered whether or not to call themselves Rush on this tour without Peart.
“Of course there was a lot of discussion,” says Lee. “(At) one point we were coming up with all these ways of not calling it Rush. And then it seemed ridiculous because when you’re learning 40 Rush songs, what the hell are you supposed to call this thing you’re doing?” He jokes, “Yeah, let’s say we’ll go out, we’ll play 40 Rush songs, we’ll call it Iron Butterfly.”
He adds using the name Rush “was just the natural thing to do.”
Rush is set to kick off their Fifty Something tour on June 7 in Los Angeles with North American dates running through Dec. 17. The tour will also hit Europe and South America.
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