Key Takeaways
- Rush’s Fifty Something Tour has surprised fans with its unexpected set lists and rare song selections.
- The band’s catalog includes 19 studio albums, showcasing a blend of hard rock, prog, and metal over 38 years.
- Four albums are often cited as Rush’s defining works, each taking the music in bold new directions.
- Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson’s collaboration continues to thrive, even after Neil Peart’s passing.
We are currently in the throes of quite unexpected Rushmania.
The Canadian group’s current Fifty Something Tour is something few, if anybody, saw coming after the 2020 passing of drummer Neil Peart seemed to put the band permanently on ice.
And it’s lifted off in a manner we also couldn’t have anticipated, with its changing set lists, the return of deep and rare selections, and full-album presentations. And certainly any skepticism about Anika Nilles’ ability to fill the Peart void has been vanquished — although some Jeff Beck fans could have told us that would be the case before the tour even started.
There’s no concrete talk of new recording yet, but there’s certainly a substantial body of work Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are drawing from — 19 studio albums recorded over the course of 38 years, and a range of approaches the trio applied its particular blend of hard rock, prog and metal.
There’s the raw attack of 1974’s Rush, of course (Its lone album with original drummer John Rutsey) and the high-concept daring of the first sides of 2112 and Hemispheres, the lean(er) ‘n’ mean(er) alchemy of Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, and the lush orchestrations of Clockwork Angels. And many points in-between, of course.
The entire catalog has proven to be fair game for the current incarnation of Rush is drawing from all of them, save for 1975’s Caress of Steel, pointedly not a favorite of Lee’s.
So that opens the discussion of which among them is Rush’s Big 4, the albums that best define the band — usually by taking the music in bold new directions.
Any true Rush fan will contend that they each have virtues, but we’re rolling the bones here and saying these are the four that stand above all others:
Fly By Night (1975)
Rush rocked in 1974, but the addition of Peart during July of that year (on Lee’s 21st birthday), as well as longtime producer Terry Brown, marks Rush’s real arrival and establishes the group’s bearings for the future.
There’s still a bit of finding their way going on in this sophomore set, but Peart brings a more sophisticated lyricism and musical sensibility that matched his bandmates’ ambitions. The Ayn Rand-influenced “Anthem” features a guitar solo that still holds up as one of Lifeson’s finest, and he demonstrates acumen on the slide during “Making Memories.”
The showpiece “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” introduces a suite-like conceptual prowess the trio pursued throughout the rest of its time together, and there’s crunchy rock in “Best I Can,” the Zeppy “Beneath, between & Behind” and the title track. The best is yet to come, of course, but Fly By Night holds up well more than 50 years later.
2112 (1976)
The title “track” from Rush’s fourth studio album is not its first side-long epic, but it certainly makes Caress of Steel‘s “The Fountain of Lamneth” sound like practice.
Lee, Lifeson and Peart spend more than 20 minutes telling a grand sci-fi tale drawn from Rand philosophies, along with biblical references (“and the meek shall inherit the earth”) and even a brief bit of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”
The “Overture/The Temples of Syrinx” opening has been such a staple of Rush’s live repertoire that it’s sometimes easy to forget how exciting the rest of the suite is — and the same could be said for Side Two, particularly “A Passage to Bangkok,” “The Twilight Zone,” and “Something For Nothing.”
It’s Rush’s first platinum album in the U.S. (now triple-platinum) and its first Top 5 entry on the Canadian charts. We should also note that, given the current state of the world, what Peart described happening in 2062 and 2112 — just 36 and 76 years away — is not out of the realm of possibility.
A Farewell to Kings (1977)
There’s growth all around on this follow-up to 1976’s live All the World’s a Stage, which drew Rush’s first era to a kind of end. The trio and producer Terry Brown headed overseas this time, to famed Rockfield Studios in Wales and expanded its sonic arsenal.
It’s not the first time Rush employed synthesizers, but Lee’s use of the Mini Moog is more pronounced — from the get-go on the title track, in fact — as are Lifeson’s acoustic touches, which include classical guitars in spots.
And Peart clearly did a little shopping to further bulk up his percussion set-up. A Farewell to Kings is essential if only for the majestic “Xanadu,” currently the Fifty Something Tour’s opener, but everything else is uniformly outstanding, and “Closer to the Heart” became Rush’s biggest “hit” to that point.
Then there’s “Cygnus X-1 Book 1: The Voyage,” the prelude to the next sci-fi epic that surfaces on <emHemispheres14 months later.
Moving Pictures (1981)
Rush and Brown established a fresh, leaner-sounding template on 1980’s Permanent Waves and make it even better on Moving Pictures , its second visit to Le Studio in Quebec, where the group would also record 1982’s Signals and 1984’s Grace Under Pressure.
“Tom Sawyer” opens the album as a statement of intent, undeniably accessible while still flexing plenty of chops — that middle section especially with Peart’s furious drum fills.
It sets a high bar that Rush certainly matches throughout from equally hit-worthy “Limelight”(which actually landed four spots higher on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and six higher in Canada) to instrumental fireworks of “YYZ,” two-part “The Camera Eye,” and textural add-ons in “Witch Hunt” and “Vital Signs.”
And “Red Barchetta” makes Ferrari fans out of us all. At five-times platinum Moving Pictures is still Rush’s deserved best-seller ,and it’s so nice to see it being played front-to-back this year.
Read More: How ‘Moving Pictures’ Became Rush’s Most Song-Focused Album
Rush Opening Night 2026 Photo Gallery
Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson performed their first show together in 11 years.