When Rush played the opening night of their Fifty Something tour this past June—their first full concert in 11 years, and first since the death of drummer Neil Peart—the unexpected key takeaway was that Aimee Mann had joined them on stage for the first time ever to sing her part on “Time Stand Still,” a single from the band’s 1987 album Hold Your Fire. Though among their most poignant songs, it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t a Rush diehard even considering its existence these days. “Time Stand Still” is unmistakably ’80s, drenched in keyboards and with an unusually soft guitar tone. It doesn’t exactly rock hard. But now it’s a major part of their live set, one of the few songs played every night along with classics like “Tom Sawyer” and “The Spirit of Radio.”
Rush play “Time Stand Still” and other ’80s tracks because they know the same secret their most dedicated fans do: that their so-called “synth era” has some of their very best songwriting. Peart, bassist-vocalist Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson had a bumpy ride getting there. They were Canadian misfits, too late for the scenes they wanted to be a part of. By the time they broke out of the also-ran rock underground with the 20-minute prog rock epic “2112,” in 1976, it was the dawn of punk, a scene opposed to exactly what Rush stood for. And then in the early ’80s, when they were getting heavy radio play with songs like “Tom Sawyer,” they were nerdy rock dinosaurs amid spiky new wave bands, performing complex songs about individualism and black holes sung in Lee’s voice, which started like a squawky Robert Plant and mellowed out a little—but not a lot—by then.
So after their first uneasy (but excellent) foray into synth rock with 1982’s Signals, Rush did what so many other ’70s prog rock bands did: they cut their hair, got a new producer, and loaded every inch of musical space with even more synthesizers. But instead of following peers like Genesis and Yes into dance floor territory, complete with extended remixes, Rush adapted their knotty prog rock into gleaming synth pop, still powered by Peart’s over-the-top drumming. Songs like “Subdivisions” and “Red Sector A” are among the band’s most thoughtful and most hooky, without losing the sophistication that made them Rush songs.
Despite the appearance of success, the band wasn’t totally happy with where they were going. Lifeson, who wrote all the music for the band alongside Lee since the its inception, thought the busy arrangements left no room for his guitar. ”I guess I just fought for my guitar rights for years after Signals,” he said, and by 1985, he was feeling more like a guest musician sidelined by an increasingly imperious Geddy Lee.
Lee had his own issues in this period, too, but they were a little easier to deal with: He absolutely hated his haircut. It made him feel awkward and unlike himself, and would struggle with strange mullets until he grew back his “witchy tresses” in the late ’80s. But at least he still had his phalanx of keyboards, which he was collecting as avidly as his memorial baseballs. And as for Peart, he voraciously read books and found new themes to write lyrics about, dutifully putting down his drums when needed. Each working in their own little silo and unsure about where they were going, Rush were more distant from each other than ever.
Despite the rising tension, there was one thing they could all agree on. They weren’t happy with the muddy production of 1984’s Grace Under Pressure, which they recorded in brutal, repetitive sessions with Supertramp producer Peter Henderson. So they regrouped in a studio in rural Canada to bang out some demos.
The songs that emerged from these sessions at a barn in Elora, Ontario, weren’t all that different from Grace Under Pressure, but they were faster and harder, with Lee’s chops on the keyboards crowding out Lifeson’s guitar even more. They called in Peter Collins to produce what would become Power Windows, making Lifeson even more nervous: "Whoever thought that Rush would be produced by the same guy who did Air Supply?"
The band was bewildered by Collins’ appearance: “A small man with a beard and glasses, someone you’d expect to find behind a desk in an accountancy,” Lee wrote in his autobiography. But they hit it off, enough for him to be able to suggest new approaches to the songs they’d written. He preferred quick, one-take instrumentals the band could build on, rather than trying to get the perfect snippet of guitar or bass or vocals over and over again.
It seemed like a simpler approach, but Rush’s sound actually became more dense and loaded with samples and all kinds of synthesizers. Collins even suggested a choir and orchestra to embellish a couple of the tracks. The infamously averse-to-guests trio thought, why the hell not, and they were bowled over to see these professional musicians recording their tracks. They would later credit making the album as some of the most fun they ever had. (“Working with the orchestra was hilarious, because it just looked so ridiculous watching all these people playing along to our music. They'd all be sitting there with their cans on, fiddling with their violins or whatever, and our song would be going BAAM! BAAM! BAAM! We'd be in hysterics,” Lifeson said shortly after the LP’s release.)
Though it was meant to get the band back on track from whatever errant path they had gone down, Power Windows is actually the synthiest of Rush records. It proudly wears Collins’ more-is-more style on its sleeve, making good use of a 24-track mixing desk. It’s easily the band’s gaudiest album, loaded with bright, sparkly keyboards that could have been borrowed from a Thomas Dolby production. Lifeson’s misgivings aside—“keyboards are not even real instruments,” he says in the band’s 2010 documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage—he delivers flamboyant, funky riffs and solos that go crazy on the whammy bar, his guitar taking on the tone of wobbly liquid mercury. And, of course, Peart’s bonkers drum fills are way up front in the mix, with a new layer of electronics mixed in to give the rhythm section a subtler, more layered touch.
Power Windows also has some of Rush’s best pop songs. It follows the Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures formula of massaging what would be verbose lyrics in anyone else’s hands—like the history of the atomic bomb in “Manhattan Project,” or the nature of nationalism in “Territories”—into FM radio sing-alongs, but these songs are absolutely jam-packed with vocal hooks everywhere they can fit. As usual, there’s a theme. Power Windows is a reference to a then-luxurious car add-on, but it’s also about the way people wield power, whether militarily, politically, or financially.
And yet, the album kicks off with one of the goofiest Rush tracks of all time, “The Big Money,” whose synth arrangement has the crystalline sheen of peak Prefab Sprout and the dead-eyed stare of James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. With its macho guitar riffs and shouted, ham-fisted lyrics—”Big money got a mean streak/Big money got no soul,” it’s a corny song with an even cornier video. But as it careens from the springy chorus to its incisive, propulsive verses, it’s hard not to get sucked into the band’s tale of “a Cinderella story on the tumble of the dice,” with pristine production for the pop side and Lee going nuts on the bass underneath it all for the long-time prog heads.
Though doggedly of its time, it’s remarkable how futuristic Power Windows sounds, even if it’s a slightly dated idea of the future. The synths gleam like chrome, reflecting light onto everything else. It’s hard not to be pulled in by the angelic intro to “Grand Designs,” arpeggiated and powerful like a cyborg version of “Closer to the Heart.” It starts off as a chugging riff-rocker, before rocketing into a chorus full of synth samples that unfurl like majestic keyboards from the heavens, as Lee’s double-tracked voice belts out: “Against the run of the mill/Swimming against the stream/Life in two dimensions is a mass production scheme.” Only Rush can take a philosophical treatise on modern art and make it sound and inspirational.
“For all the choir and orchestra and keyboard magic, it was still a hard rock record,” Lee says in his autobiography, perhaps defensively. “We were just adding more music to our music.” At the center of the album—the peak of the album’s tone and grandeur—is “Marathon,” a dazzling soundscape of drums that seem to splash water off every cymbal hit. Every new iteration of the chorus is more intense until a head rush of a breakdown and a killer guitar solo. After Lifeson’s star turn, the song turns sumptuous and slow—a rest period—before the choir comes in and the most ridiculous key change of any Rush song comes in, sending Lee’s vocals to new heights.
Closer “Mystic Rhythms” is notable for being one of the first examples of Peart, one of the most legendary drummers in rock music history, using electronic drums. The sound is different, but the percussion hits no less hard, and Peart is a large part of what keeps the album from sounding like a limp synth-pop detour, along with the sparkling production. It’s the difference that makes tracks like “Middletown Dreams,” a song about being stuck in dead-end suburbia, feel vital instead of mawkish. His drums keep the lush background of synth bass, artificial strings, and funk guitar from falling apart or flying away.
The best song on Power Windows isn’t the most impressive, it’s the most mysterious. “Emotion Detector” is one of the few songs that Rush have never played live; apparently, it was a real pain in the ass to record, too. It’s a maze of interlocking arpeggios and motifs, moving in tandem like gears in some arcane machine, before it crashes into a chorus whose lyrics mirror its own momentum: “Right to the heart of the matter/Right to the beautiful part.” Add in one of Lifeson’s most impressive solos, and it’s the pinnacle of an album which is also an unlikely pinnacle in the band’s catalogue, arguably the last front-to-back great Rush record where all members were firing on all cylinders—even Alex Lifeson.
The unsung Power Windows holds an unique place in the Rush pantheon. There are famous fans, including Trent Reznor, who once said that the way Rush incorporated synthesizers changed how he conceived what his own music could be. Lee himself has consistently picked out the album as a favorite among classics like Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures—as an example of a time when the band actually had fun making a record, and felt good about it after. You can hear it in the music, which bursts with both joy and trepidation, as shiny and cutting-edge now as it was back in the day. Songwriting aside, its uniquely synthetic palette reminds me of other records of that year, like Hounds of Love or Steve McQueen. Music would never sound quite like this again, and neither would Rush.
After iffy follow-up Hold Your Fire’s critical and commercial failure—despite the presence of “Time Stand Still”—the band lost its way, professing to go back to capital-R rock with 1989’s Presto (arguably their wimpiest album), and then really doing it with the musclebound Roll the Bones, which also featured a rap verse from Geddy Lee. They corrected course with 1993’s grunge-inspired Counterparts, and since then, they’ve been a workhorse rock band with the occasional brilliant song that calls back to their glory days. At least with Power Windows, they didn’t feel like they were flailing. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Speaking about the synth era in a slightly contentious section of Beyond the Lighted Stage, Peart says, sagely, “We didn’t have any protective nature of what Rush was…There was no such thing as ‘that doesn’t suit Rush.’ Those words have never been uttered.” Power Windows was one of the last gasps of that truly open-hearted version of the band, before they felt pressured to rock out, eventually culminating in the no-synths-anywhere Vapor Trails album in 2002. They never stopped making music that lived up to their incredible legacy, but they also never made music that sounded as full of possibilities as this.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan
