Rediscovering Rush
February 2018
Picture the scene: here I sit in my comfortable office typing merrily away on my trusty computer. I'm wearing my Rush R40 t-shirt; to my left is a pile of CDs, including some of my favourites by Rush; on the left-hand monitor I have iTunes open, and it contains my entire digital Rush collection, which amounts to pretty much everything the band ever released; to my right is a slowly growing stack of vinyl albums, including a great many - original releases, re-releases and new repackaged box sets - by Rush. You get the picture - if I have (or had; that's something I'll come back to) a favourite band, there would be no prizes on offer for guessing that the three Canadians might be up there.
But it was not always thus. As an impressionable teenager, I fell under the spell of Rush; as a slightly more mature adult, I gradually stopped listening to them. Things happened; my life moved in a different direction; I was no longer the kind of person who elbowed my way to the front at noisy rock concerts. I had, I thought, moved on. Then some things happened, not least of which was emigrating to a country where the music of Rush is more widely celebrated (although this process, as we shall see, began before that), and I gradually came back into the fold.
Along the way, I found myself wondering just what my early obsession was about, why I had grown apart from them, and why, when I decided to let myself back in, what exactly all the fuss was about; why this music in particular made me feel the way I did. I found a Rush forum (strictly speaking, I found The Rush Forum), invited myself in, rounded up the music, and began a semi-public voyage of rediscovery.
Before all the stuff I wrote fell victim to Bit Rot, it having mostly been written in a two-year span from 2005, I thought I should reclaim it, save it, tidy it up, and make it more widely available. Hence the new category on here. Over the next few weeks, I shall post my (edited for clarity, tidied up for language and redacted where appropriate) thoughts as I wrote them at the time - this all happened during the period when we were emigrating, and I'm not sure that every one of my thoughts remains exactly as it was, but it's a record of what I was thinking at the time, as I reacted to the impending and unfolding upheaval in my life by retreating to my musical past, and discovered that it might just also be my musical future...
I'm not looking back, but I'd like to look around me now.