Like Clockwork?: Geddy Lee Discusses the Progression of Clockwork Angels

Last month, we reported that Rush appeared on the cover of Issue #16 of the UK magazine Classic Rock: Prog. The magazine had a lengthy spread on Rush, consisting of five separate articles as well as a review of the Deluxe Edition of Moving Pictures. One of the articles, titled Like Clockwork? is a discussion with Geddy Lee on the writing and recording process behind Rush's forthcoming album Clockwork Angels. Here are some excerpts from the article: "We're going in a conceptual direction on this record, for sure," says Lee. "We started with a 10-minute song idea that then turned into a concept and it's feeding off itself. It's like that question that Steven Colbert asked us in the movie. 'Are your songs so long that by the end you're influencing yourself?' I think we're doing that now. We're like a feedback loop, influencing ourselves now. We're spending so much time on this concept. It's been fun, because we haven't gone down that road in a while. Let's see if we can pull it off!" Outside of the conceptual nature of Clockwork Angels, Geddy touches upon the fact that the album's creative process has been interrupted several times; not quite the norm for a Rush album: "It's been quite weird because we've never really taken so long and interrupted a writing process so many times," he states. "We have about six songs finished and waiting to go into preproduction and then be recorded. We've been kind of afraid to go back to them, because we don't want to start fucking around with them, we liked them at the time. We're very obsessive about fiddling with our own music, so we just said 'Okay, let's leave them in that state until we're ready to get more serious.' "Alex and I tried to do some writing on this break." Geddy continues. "We've had three months, so we thought 'Okay, so maybe we should get all of the rest of the record finished' ... but Neil just had a baby last year and he needed to use that time to be a dad and to be domestic, and he didn't want to uproot and get into this intense writing session, and that was totally cool. So Alex and I have been getting together regularly and jamming, and now we have a lot of good material just lying around in suspended animation." In the feature interview/article of the issue titled "The Beat Goes On", Neil Peart also touches upon the delay in finishing Clockwork Angels: I feel a certain urgency, I really want to get that record made while I'm still able to," he says. "It was hard for me to set the album aside to tour, this really means a lot to me, I intend it to be my highest achievement lyrically and drumming wise, so I really want to get it done while we still can." Look for a complete transcription of all the articles from this issue to appear on Cygnus-X1.Net later this month.