Geddy Lee is one of the most technically accomplished musicians in rock history — a bassist, vocalist, and keyboardist whose combination of skills on a single stage has been described by musicians across genres as among the most remarkable in live performance. He has spent fifty years inside Rush’s catalog with the specific intimacy of someone who wrote it, recorded it, performed it thousands of times, and has had fifty years to form opinions about every element of it that go far beyond the assessments available to the most dedicated outside listener.
Those opinions, when Lee has shared them in interviews, have occasionally produced responses from Rush fans that range from bewilderment to genuine distress — because the songs Lee is least comfortable with are not the obscure album tracks that casual fans have never heard, but recordings that the fanbase considers essential to understanding what Rush accomplished.
The song Lee has been most specific about is Closer to the Heart — the 1977 track from A Farewell to Kings that became one of the band’s most performed songs and one of the most requested at every concert across the following four decades. Lee has said the song is too simple — that it represents a kind of directness and accessibility that was commercially effective and that he understands why audiences respond to it with such consistency, but that sits in an uncomfortable place relative to the technical and compositional ambitions that he considers the actual center of Rush’s work.
He has been careful about how he says this, because the distance between “I’m not comfortable with this song” and “this song is not good” is a distance that matters enormously to the millions of people for whom Closer to the Heart is the Rush song that reached them. He is not saying it is not good. He is saying it is not the thing he is proud of in the way he is proud of YYZ or The Camera Eye or Natural Science — songs that required everything the band had and demonstrated what they were actually capable of.
The song that Lee has been less direct about but that emerges clearly in the pattern of his interviews as something he carries with complicated feeling is Tom Sawyer — the song that is most commonly cited by people who know only one Rush song, and that Lee has performed so many times and in such varied states of connection with the material that it has become, by his implicit account, something between a professional obligation and a creative statement, depending on the night.
He has said, in interviews about the band’s final years before their 2018 retirement following Neil Peart’s illness and eventual death, that the experience of deciding which songs to include in final setlists was the most emotionally complicated creative decision of his career — because choosing the songs meant choosing what Rush was going to be remembered as, and the songs that the audience most reliably wanted were not always the songs that Lee believed most completely expressed what the band had been.
Peart died in January 2020. Lee has said he does not know if he will perform Rush songs again in any sustained way. The songs he has been most uncomfortable with are the ones that audiences are most likely to demand — which is the specific form of the trap that commercial success sets for serious musicians, and that Lee has navigated with more honesty than most.