Rush is Touring and We are Excited

No, we’re not joking. Why would we be joking?

We admit that we have not listened to a new Rush album since the quintessential Canadian power trio unleashed 1993’s Counterparts, which came out when we were in high school, and which spawned a tour that we might possibly have seen and loved even despite the presence of opening act Candlebox. And maybe if we’re honest with ourselves we didn’t totally hate Candlebox either.

Anyway, Rush is back! According to the most exciting press release we’ve read in some time, the band—bespectacled falsetto Geddy Lee, workhorse guitarist Alex Lifeson and Greatest Drummer Of All Time Neil Peart—will tour from June 29 to October 2, playing their Moving Pictures album in its entirety.

We could not help but notice that, on September 29, Rush will perform in our own back yard at a suburban Atlanta venue called the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, which we’re sure is just wonderful. But why see the band in your back yard when you could see them in your house?

Members of Rush, representatives of Rush, friends and family of Rush, heed this call: We, the staff of Paste magazine (especially managing editor Nick Marino, who often writes in the first-person plural, and who should be held responsible for the vast majority of this blog post), hereby invite you to perform in our office studio. You would not be the first band to stop by and play. It happens all the time! We even have a whole section of our website, where we post video footage of bands playing in our office as we politely golf-clap in the shadows.

You, Rush, would join such luminaries as Josh Ritter, Brandi Carlile and that guy Colin Hay from Men At Work, who stopped by not long ago and played an acoustic version of his band’s big hit “Down Under.” You could totally play your old hits, too! We know you probably feel obligated to perform all your new songs, new being roughly defined as post-1993, but you’d rather play the old hits that you never get tired of—even after playing them for decades upon decades. Rush, we will indulge you. We will indulge you and we will love you.

Here are but a few reasons you should join us here in Decatur for an afternoon of song:

1) The office is teeming with Rush fans. Just moments ago, as we were playing “Spirt of Radio” in the office, and we sang along with the climactic “concert hall” line, two different staff members chortled, and we are almost positive they were laughing with us and not at us.

2) You would be working directly with multimedia producer Kevin Keller, a former public-radio legend, a man with a heart of gold and a throat of silver. In addition to his mellifluous speaking voice, he sings chorale music as a second tenor. “Last I checked,” he tells us, “I still have the A below high C.” He could totally harmonize with Geddy! And if you wind up not liking him, you can just play “YYZ” and make him wait haplessly for his cue.

3. We have, here in the Metro Atlanta area, our very own Canadian restaurant! It is called Bugaboo Creek Steak House and it offers the “flavor of the Canadian Rockies.” It’ll be just like home.

4. You can sign “the wall.” The wall is a wall outside Kevin Keller’s office. Every band who plays here signs the wall. Look how many bands have played here!

5. We supported you as recently as last week, when one of our colleagues was compiling a playlist of pollen-related songs, and we beseeched her to include your song “The Trees,” with its heart-wrenching lyric “There is unrest in the forest / There is trouble with the trees / For the maples want more sunlight / And the oaks ignore their pleas.” It doesn’t even have anything to do with pollen, but we got it on there anyway!

6. We are still in touch with some dudes from high school. We have vivid memories of riding the bus and listening to Exit Stage Left on one of these guys’ boom boxes. We also recall listening to Chronicles, and admiring the drum fills toward the end of “Subdivisions.” We are many years removed from these events, and yet they are burned into our adolescent psyche, and even today we relish the thought of telling our high-school buddies that a band we worshipped back in the day is playing right here in our very office.

We will stop now, but we ask you to consider this humble request. We eagerly await your decision. Think about it, but please don’t dawdle. As a wise man once said, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Air drumming even as we type this,
Paste