Alex Lifeson Admits Relearning Rush Songs Was Harder Than He Expected
There’s a chord that Rush fans call the Lifeson chord.
Alex Lifeson didn’t name it after himself. He heard it on the radio first, back when Xanadu came across WCMF and stopped him cold. He had to go figure out what it was. An F#7sus4 with a third, if you want to be technical about it. He just calls it the Lifeson chord now and laughs about it.
That moment says a lot about how Lifeson approaches the guitar. He hears something, gets obsessed with it, goes and figures it out. Fifty years into one of rock’s most celebrated careers, that curiosity hasn’t gone anywhere.
What has changed is what it takes to play those songs again.
When Rush started getting serious about the Fifty Something Tour, Lifeson had to go back and relearn parts he wrote decades ago. What surprised him was how much that process humbled him.
“I kind of forgot how hard they were,” he said. “I never thought of them as being that difficult. They were just natural for me.”
He laughed when he admitted to watching his own YouTube videos to remember how certain parts went. “It’s kind of cheating, I guess, if you’ve actually wrote the thing.”
The muscle memory was there in pieces. The rest took real work.
Lifeson has been playing pretty consistently since Rush went quiet. He put out two albums with Envy of None, a side project that pushed him into completely different guitar territory. But going back to the Rush catalog was its own kind of relearning, and the difficulty caught him off guard.
He’s bringing somewhere around 15 to 20 guitars on the road. His go-to for the heavier material is a custom shop tobacco sunburst Les Paul reissue. But the guitar he actually uses for most of his writing? A 1952 Telecaster reissue he bought in 1980 and has played to near-death since. The finish is stripped off the neck. He maintains it with 400-grit sandpaper. He’s been playing it for 45 years and says it still feels better in his lap than anything else he owns.
For this tour, he’s doing something he finds genuinely exciting. Instead of running one great guitar tone all night, he’s built out sounds that match what each song actually sounded like on the record. The Tom Sawyer guitar sound for Tom Sawyer. The Limelight tone for Limelight. He’s been using the IK Multimedia ToneX for this, which was built partly using models of his own amp collection.
“After an hour, an hour and a half, it’s like it’s the same sound,” he said about most tours he’s attended. With this approach, the guitar tone shifts through the night the same way the catalog itself shifted across decades.
That catalog is worth looking back at, and Lifeson did a lot of that in the conversation.
He talked about the early days in Toronto, renting a Marshall cabinet from a place called Kalua Music and paying for it ten times over before finally buying it out. When Rush signed to Mercury Records in 1974 and got their first advance, the band went straight to Long & McQuade and spent everything. Two 100-watt Marshall stacks, a couple of Les Pauls, another 335. Geddy Lee walked out with two SVT bass rigs.
“We could be extremely loud and dirty,” Lifeson said.
That rig lasted a couple of years before he traded the Marshalls for Hi-Watt stacks. Then, around 1978 or 1979, he caught Allan Holdsworth playing a club show in London using a Marshall 2×12 combo, and that became his setup through Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures.
When Rush moved into the dense keyboard era of the mid-80s, Lifeson had to adapt in a way that still clearly frustrates him a little when he thinks about it. The keyboards were tracked first, layers kept building, and by the time it was his turn to play, there was barely room in the frequency range for a heavy guitar.
“By the way, I’m the guitar player in this band,” he said. “Did I resent it? Maybe a little bit.”
His solution was to switch to a single-coil active pickup guitar that could cut through the mid-range the keyboards had swallowed. That bright, almost brittle sound became the signature tone of those records precisely because it was the only thing that would fit.
Producer Kevin Shirley eventually talked him into going back to basics. In typical Shirley fashion, the conversation was not subtle. He told Lifeson the band was playing with “dinky stupid direct sounds,” told him PRS guitars were coffee tables, and refused to let him use reverb. They re-recorded a lot of the guitar parts with Lifeson in the room with the amps cranked up.
“The guitar is just vibrating like crazy. The neck’s vibrating, you’re vibrating, your teeth are vibrating.” He said he understood then what Shirley was after. That resonance. That physical connection between the player and the instrument.
He records that way more often now.
Outside of gear, the most interesting parts of the conversation were about how Lifeson actually works as a player. Geddy Lee has described him elsewhere as a spontaneous genius, which Lifeson doesn’t argue with — though he phrases it differently. He says he loses interest fast. After five takes in the studio, he’s done. Takes two and three are usually where the best stuff lives. By take five, he’s already thinking about something else.
His solo on The Garden happened because Geddy was out of town and left him alone in the studio. Lifeson recorded the part, forgot he’d done it, left, and Geddy came home to find it waiting. “What the hell did you do?” is how Geddy apparently put it. “This is one of your best solos ever.”
Lifeson listened back later and agreed.
The Limelight solo is his favorite to talk about. It was recorded after midnight in a studio in the Laurentians, with the amp cabinet outside picking up natural reverb from the surrounding hills. He used a Hamer Sportsmaster with a vibrato arm and ran five takes before leaving the room. The instability in that solo — the bending notes that don’t quite resolve, the lack of control — was intentional.
“It’s bending and it’s not stable and that’s kind of how it feels sometimes when you’re on the road. You don’t feel stable and you feel like you’re bending all the time to everything.”
Neil Peart wrote Limelight about the discomfort of fame, and Lifeson said he wanted the guitar to feel that way.
He doesn’t talk about Neil Peart’s absence directly in the conversation, but it’s there in the edges of everything. The way he talks about the band’s internal dynamic — Geddy as the methodical one, Neil as the lyricist who had strong opinions about vocals but always came around — makes it clear how much the three of them shaped each other over 40-plus years.
When asked what record he’s proudest of, Lifeson said Moving Pictures without much hesitation. Not because it’s the most famous thing they made, but because the songs and the sound all came together at the same time. He described it as a record with a real uniformity to it, where every song still sounds different from the last.
He also mentioned Permanent Waves in the same breath. “It’s kind of overlooked at times, but it has a particular character to it.”
Signals, on the other hand, he’s never been satisfied with. The production bothered him then and still does.
The Fifty Something Tour is scheduled across multiple cities with four-night stands in some markets, which gives Rush the ability to rotate through a pool of roughly 38 to 39 songs without repeating the same set two nights in a row. For Lifeson, that flexibility matters.
“It’s a celebration of all that music.”
He still sounds like someone who just wants to play guitar. Not play guitar for an arena. Not perform guitar. Just play it.
That’s probably the same thing he told his parents at 17 when that conversation got filmed by accident, and they had no idea what to make of it.
Turns out they didn’t need to.
I’m Drew, the founder and editor of Front of the Stage. I have a strong love for music and photography, which started at a very young age. There’s just something I love about experiencing live music and capturing memories that will last a lifetime, and that’s how Front of the Stage came to be.
