Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years.
Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently.
That is what intrigues me; songwriting and song structure and expression.
Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process.
When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.
With me, satisfaction is always very fleeting with our work. I always get a little restless with it.
Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.
It's a battle between record company, between producer and between mastering engineer. Because the louder you make your record in a digital process, the more dynamics are squished out of it. Nobody knows exactly what happens, but the dynamics in the performance disappear, and everything is at the same volume.
It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
Playing live is such a total visceral experience, and really, as a musician, you're trained from the beginning to be a live performer.
Live albums are very important for Rush, and they became sort of a closing chapter for us.
Live records of mine are very painful to listen to because you always think you can do it better. I don't think I have a single favorite one.
I worry about my voice 24/7 when I'm on tour. It's like a pitcher and his arm. It's constantly the thing that my whole life revolves around.
Well, I've been lucky. I've never gotten a voice polyp. I've never gotten nodes. But I do get sick, usually every tour, and to varying degrees. Sometimes it's a sinusitis.
I think you just have to cross your fingers that there's enough artists out there that keep producing interesting work, and eventually it will form a kind of wave that will force people to pay attention to it.
I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.
Certainly my personality, my sense of humor, my outlook on life was informed by the experiences of my parents and the stories they shared with me.
