Geddy Lee has nominated Rush's 2002 album Vapor Trails as the most difficult record the band ever made.
Released six years after its predecessor Test For Echo, the longest gap between any two Rush albums, the Toronto's trio 17th studio album was made in the wake of drummer Neil Peart losing both his wife Jacqueline Taylor, and his teenage daughter Selena, two tragedies which led the heartbroken drummer to inform Lee and Alex Lifeson that they should consider him "retired." And as Lee explains in a new interview with Vulture, "The whole idea of making Vapor Trails had to be very considerate."
"Vapor Trails was a very, very difficult record to make, because it was sort of a reunion record after Neil's tragedies," Lee tells Vulture. "He disappeared from view for quite some time and found himself living in California and starting a new life. He came back to us, as he put it, 'seeking gainful employment.'
"We settled into a studio for almost a year and constructed a working environment so Neil could feel free to go in and reintroduce himself to his drums and his playing without feeling like everyone’s watching him."
As Lee recalls, he and Lifeson found new ideas slow to come, "and the early ones weren’t satisfying."
"There was so much emotional static and fear that the whole process became very long and imbued with paranoia," he explains. "By the time we had assembled all these songs, which we were very happy with, they were coming from a whole variety of sources. Some of them were jam sessions that we kept on tape and never fine-tuned sonically. Right through the project, by the time we got to the mixing process at the end, it was problematic. It was difficult because a lot of the sounds on this very dense record weren’t recorded in an ideal way. It became an impossible journey to get the record made and get it sounding the way we wanted to. We exhausted our original engineer and co-producer, and had to bring somebody else in to help us finish it. It was just a fucker to make. A real fucker."
Talking to Prog magazine in 2015, Alex Lifeson admitted that he was just pleased that Rush came through the making of the album, even if the group weren't entirely happy with its sound, which he described as "too loud and undynamic."
"That really drove us crazy," said Lifeson. "Probably Geddy more than Neil or myself. It was a very, very dark period for Neil, so his involvement was minimal, he trusted that we’d do the right thing... I’m glad we got past that."
