RUSH - Cygnus-X1.Net

I\lE 11I I ILlDBLI1_' ,Jim Ladd: Tonight we welcome back to Innerview a Canadian trio that hasblended virtuoso musicianship, technical excellence and visionarylyrics into one-of-a-kind musical statement. The man responsible forwriting these visionary lyrics is our guest tonight.On Rush's most recent LP 'Grace Under Pressure', drummer and lyricistNeil Peart explores a wide range of subjects. The lead off track'Distant Early Warning' looks in part at our very tense world situationwhere the individual can be swallowed up by the masses.Neil Peart: The main theme of the song is a series of things, but that'scertainly one of the ideas, living in the modern world basically, inall its manifestations: In terms of the distance from us of the threatof super powers and nuclear missiles pointed at each other across theocean. There's all of that, but that tends to add a little bit ofdistance from people's lives, but at the same time I think it is inthe present, the threat looms somewhere in everyones subconscious. Andthen it deals with closer things in terms of relationships and how tokeep a relationship in such a swift moving world. It has something todo with our particular lives - dealing with revolving doors, going inand out; I think that's generally true with people in the modern worldwhere things for a lot of people are very difficult, so consequentlywork and the mundane concerns of life tend to take precedence over theimportant values of relationships, of the larger world and the world ofthe abstract as opposed to the concrete; dealing with all those thingswith grace ..... . And when I see a little bit of grace in someone's life I feel Icould drive past a horrible tenement building and see these wonderfulpink flamingoes up there on the balcony; something, some little aspectof humanity strikes you as a beautiful resistance, if you like. Somekind of graceful adaptation I think, because you can't help to overcomewhat life is made up of today, you can't run away to hide from it, andyou can't really beat it; so you have to learn to adapt, which has beena key word in my thinking over the past few years. Where change can'treally be affected by the individual person; so what you have to do isincrease your powers of adaptation in dealing with these pressures.I think in a major case, a group of individual people can.certa~nlystill make something happen, but it seems so futile somet~mes w~th ,matters concerning authority of all kinds, when it comes to governmentswhen it comes to churches, when it comes to moral majorities and allthese ridiculously ignorant societies that are, permeating our society,telling people what to do. You can't really fight those ~sindividual person, but you can fight them through educat~on w~th a lot7' can.