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Alex Lifeson names the hardest Rush song to play on guitar
No, it isn’t La Villa Strangiato.
Image: Mat Hayward / Getty Images
Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson has named the most challenging song in the band’s catalogue – and the answer might just surprise you.
In a recent interview with Ultimate Guitar, Lifeson speaks about his creative process, highlighting in particular, his approach to recording guitar solos on Rush’s albums.
“I think with my guitar playing, I’m always looking for something different,” Lifeson begins [via Killer Guitar Rigs]. “I get very impatient very quickly when we’re working.”
“For me, doing solos, for example, the first three or four takes of whatever I’m doing are my best takes. And then I don’t know if I become bored, I don’t know if I lose interest or what it is exactly, but the energy level on those first handful of takes are always what I’m going after.”
“It’s like that with a lot of things with me,” he adds. “It seems I’m starting to understand myself a little better, that everything, I just want to do it, and then I want to move on to something else. And that used to bug me in the past, but now I’ve come to embrace it, and I quite like it.”
Asked which was the “most challenging” Rush song to record thus far, Lifeson replies jokingly: “Oh, every one?”
“One that comes off the top of my head would be Natural Science,” he says. “That’s pretty intense playing. And in the studio, we’d play things a million times before we were confident we got the best take. So, playing that particular song a million times was challenging.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Lifeson also touched on his post-Rush project Envy of None, saying: “We released [That Was Then] last year, and I love the guitar playing on that because it’s not traditional guitar playing.”
“It’s not what you’d expect from me or what someone’s perception of my guitar playing is. I got to make the guitar sound like some other instrument and that’s challenging, and it’s exciting, and I like the mystery of that sort of approach.”
Watch the full interview below.