Neil Peart's "News Weather and Sports" - June 2015

Neil Peart has updated his website with the latest issue of "News Weather & Sports." Titled "Backstage Byways", you can read it here.  Neil writes about the R40 tour warmups and his motorcycle adventures on the first leg of the tour, and tells of his 5-year old daughter Olivia's first Rush concert:

It was also Olivia’s first Rush concert, and she loved it. I had thought she might last a song or two, but she danced and air-drummed right to the end. Manager Ray arranged a “box” for them, high up over everything, and Olivia couldn’t get over all the people.

“There must be two-thousand-and-eighteen people,” she said.

Ray laughed and told her, “Actually there are about eleven thousand!”

Olivia looked puzzled, “Are they all here to see my dad and Uncle Alex and Uncle Geddy?”

When Ray assured her they were, she said, “That’s too silly.”

Then she wondered, “Do they know he’s my dad?”

Ray laughed and said, “They probably do.”

During intermission she came backstage and ran up to me, arms raised for me to pick her up. Still wearing her big red “ear defenders,” she was so excited that she bounced in my arms.

“Daddy! It was great! I only didn’t like the shipwreck” (rearscreen video in “The Wreckers,” to her an echo of the dark beginning of Frozen, a movie she finds rightly unbearable) “and the explosion!” (Pyro-man Boom-Boom’s fireworks in “Far Cry.”)