I’ve been very fortunate to have met a few of my heroes, including Elvis Costello when I was drunk off of free backstage beer. Costello could have destroyed me in our brief but memorable conversation together, but there was no need. His ego didn’t demand it, and he was apparently interested in our conversation, or at least was interested in talking to a fan for a dozen minutes or so. The conversation probably would have lasted longer had I not tried to kiss him—that was a big note-to-self moment for myself, if not for both of us…

When I know I am going to meet someone I admire, I approach the moment with caution. I’d rather keep it short than shatter any myths. So when I learned I was going to interview Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, my guitar hero for as long as I’ve been a guitar player, I just knew I was going to come across like a geek at a Star Trek convention, and at some point Mr. Lifeson would feel obliged to recommend I get a life. I spent hours writing down all my gushy Rush-geek questions and comments and then burying them like kim chee, all with the hopes of being able to draw up some proper questions about playing guitar, and about Rush. It was really hard since I thought I already knew everything there was about the band. Balancing questions about what it’s like to play “YYZ” on a real guitar as opposed to the plastic one from the Guitar Hero video game and say, questions about the chords of his impromptu ‘jazz number’ on Rush in Rio was quite a challenge. Also, in “The Sphere” from “Cygnus X-1 Book II”, is the time signature really 11/8 or is it alternating between 5/4 and 6/4? See what I mean?

Fortunately, Lifeson is a generous interviewee, so things turned rather quickly into a conversation about something we both love—him! No wait, that’s not right. Like his bandmates, Lifeson comes across very unassuming. So we ended up talking about the thing that brought us together—a love for playing guitar and a love for music—with some Rush on the side! 

Crawdaddy!: Snakes and Arrows has been a huge chart-topping success, and one of Rush’s biggest albums. At some point when you were making it, did you realize that this was going to be a big record along the lines of Moving Pictures or 2112, two of Rush’s most influential albums?

Alex Lifeson: I don’t know, it’s like a birth. It’s a pregnancy and you don’t quite know how the kid is going to turn out. And then after the term, there it is and in this case, it was a beautiful baby.   

We felt very positive about it right from the start. The way Geddy [Lee, bass and vocals] and I were writing—very casually in the beginning and then introducing Nick [Rasculinecz, producer] into the mix about two-thirds of the way through—and then his influence and the great recording studio, Allaire, which unfortunately is going out of business.

Then the whole mixing in LA went really well. We had never done anything like that before. It was the first time we actually recorded and mixed a record in America.

So every aspect of the process of making that record was very, very positive. It was a cumulative thing, and at the end we felt it was some of our very best work.

Crawdaddy!: I’m sorry to hear that Allaire Studios is going out of business [it recently closed after this interview took place]. The ‘Making of Snakes and Arrows’ documentary on the MVI version of the album really shows off the studio, and what it’s like to make a Rush record. I guess Allaire is another casualty of the Pro Tools home studio world.

Lifeson: Oh, exactly. And they had such a great set-up there. I mean the rooms were great, the equipment, the control room with the big Neve console in it was one of the best rooms I’ve heard anywhere. The accommodations were great, the staff was great, they had it all. But unfortunately, yeah, you can go anywhere now, take your Pro Tools, and make a record, and that’s what everyone is doing.

Crawdaddy!: “Faithless” is one of my favorites from Snakes and Arrows, partly because it has such a monster solo—any reason you didn’t play it on the tour?

Lifeson: Well, we were torn. We wanted to play the whole record live, but we had to settle for nine songs, otherwise we’d be playing for four hours and that’s a little too much for us and, I think, for our audience. We had to make a decision about some of the songs we wanted to do. We all really wanted to do “Faithless”, and we talked about actually doing it on the last half of the tour. We prepped it and we ran through it a couple of times, but in the end we just decided to kind of stick with what we had and just change up some of the older stuff.

Crawdaddy!: It must be a very tough decision when you have an album like that.

Lifeson: Yeah, well what you do is one set you do Snakes and Arrows and then the next set you do all the old stuff. But I think that breaks it up a little too much for us. We like to mix the whole thing so that the show is more representative of our whole career.

Crawdaddy!: Rush concerts have become a clinic on how to play a rock concert.

Lifeson: Yeah, we’ve been at it for a while. [Laughs]