ILLUSTRATION COMPOSITE: MAGICTORCH, SHUTTTETRERSTOCK AND GETTY IMAGES

More than 40 years have passed by since the release of Rush’s Hemispheres album. Not only is it one of their most widely beloved records, it’s also arguably the one that most thrillingly encapsulates the progressive abandon of the Canadian trio’s first decade together.

One of the most vociferously debated and lauded albums in Rush’s vast catalogue, its 36 minutes of pioneering prog is notorious for having pushed the three musicians to the limit of their abilities. Hemispheres is also often cited as the album that nearly broke Rush for good. Bassist/vocalist/keyboard player Geddy Lee takes us back to the trials, tribulations and, ultimately, triumph of the making of it.

In the spring of 1978, after finishing a gruelling world tour in support of the hugely successful A Farewell To Kings, Rush were too full of ideas to contemplate taking a rest.

“I think we were tired after the touring but at the same time we were also feeling pretty good,” Lee says. “Our range was expanding and we were feeling pretty ambitious at that time, which is evidenced in the crazy record that we made in Wales. We’d had a good experience working at Rockfield Studios before, and that left a good taste about the whole idea of recording in Britain again. When we arrived in Wales we were psyched, we were excited, but at the same time we were not superwell prepared. Although we had a lot of ideas, we hadn’t really hammered them out. So we found ourselves in a new situation, in a house not far from Rockfield. We’d planned to be there for a short time, and it turned into a much longer time, as everything to do with that album did. I’d say we were excited and a little bit nervous about the lack of preparation, but we were ready to dig in.”

“What surprises me to this day is that so many fans come up to me and say that they think Hemispheres is the ultimate Rush album.”

Geddy Lee

Hemispheres’ reputation as a difficult album to make is probably well founded. With nothing concrete to lay down on tape, Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer/lyricist Neil Peart were under considerable pressure to conjure an album’s worth of material within a few short weeks. It is perhaps indicative of how potent the chemistry was between the trio at this time, that being woefully under-prepared seems to have pushed them to unexpected new heights. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the songwriting sessions were spent working on Hemispheres’ grandiloquent opener, Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres, the sequel to previous album A Farewell To Kings’ grand conceptual closer Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage.

“Once the lyrics started coming together and we saw that Neil had this strong conceptual piece in his head, that sort of helped us to form a plan of action, and so I think it was quite an exciting way to work,” says Lee. “In the past we’d usually save one song on any album to write while we were in the studio, just off-the-cuff. Usually those songs would point us in a different direction for the next record – songs like The Twilight Zone [from 2112, 1976], Vital Signs [Moving Pictures, 1981] and New World Man [Signals, 1982], for example. But this was a lot more than just: ‘Let’s write a short, fiveminute tune.’

“We’d get together in this room in the house where our gear was set up, and we’d wrestle with the lyrics and put together melodies,” he continues. “We’d do all of that sitting around with each other, not necessarily plugged in, with Alex on an acoustic guitar, perhaps, and me on my bass, or sometimes we’d both write on acoustics. Then, with Neil, we’d hammer out a loose structure and then we’d take it to the next step, get behind the machinery and start playing it out until we were able to form the song. It was very much a threeway street in terms of coming up with the final version of the song.”