The Top Ten Reasons to Feel Proud to Be a Fan of Rush

Reason #8

To borrow a phrase from Frank Sinatra, one of the other musical artists who sold about as many albums in his career as Rush has in theirs, your favorite band is a band that truly did it “My Way.”

Rush’s desire to march to the beat of their own 33-piece drum kit has been well-documented.  At a time when their record company was urging them to go for a more mainstream sound, they recorded their iconoclastic magnum opus “2112.”

In a 2018 article in Sharp magazine, Geddy Lee recalled, ““We were young and didn’t have a whole lot of options.  So we either had to give up… or go down in flames while trying to do this thing we thought was right.

“We didn’t agree with what the record company wanted us to be.  But we didn’t really know what we wanted us to be.  We knew what we didn’t want to be, and that was what they wanted us to be.”

Guitarist Vernon Reid of Living Colour once told Neil Peart that Rush had shown him that “a band could make it the way they wanted to.”

And looking back on what he and his bandmates had accomplished, Alex Lifeson conclued, “If there was any one achievement, it would be that we have done it on our own terms.”