"Greg was selected to join the house band at the Orbit Room in Toronto, where he partnered with hall of fame guitarist Alex Lifeson of Rush. The relationship led to collaborative studio projects with country music stars Clay Aiken, Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Tim McGraw, the Dixie Chicks and Jo Dee Messina. A favorite stage memory is captured in photograph in his office of him playing the drums with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush. 'You’ve got to understand that growing up in Toronto and being a kid who played drums, all I dreamed about was one day being good enough to sit in and play with Neil Peart,' Critchley said. 'I was fascinated by him as a kid.'...He shared a story of the band learning to play Rush songs, and then inviting Neil’s younger sister over to the house to watch them play. 'I don’t know if Neil ever knew that or not. If so, he never said anything and I’ve never asked him.'"Check out the full interview here.
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"And I remember having such a great show in Dallas that night,” says Lifeson. “We were playing a lot of our bar set — stuff we put together very quickly with Neil off the first show. We played ‘Bad Boy,’ the Beatles song. We were out with Uriah Heep, Rory Gallagher, Nazareth, relegated to a 20-minute, half-hour sets. So we would pick up these club dates where we would play for a couple of hours, and that was a really exciting night, because nobody knew who we were, and we won the crowd over that night. The place was just roaring by the end of it, and we all just thought, ‘Texas is awesome!’”Check out the full interview here.
"We committed to a year, so that's going to take us through to the end of next summer, for sure. That's the minimum. We haven't stopped or quit. Right now we're just relaxing. We're taking it easy and just enjoying our current employment...typically get a little bored, and so we enjoy writing and working together and I wouldn't doubt that some time in the new year we'll probably gravitate towards each other and start doing some writing. It's going to be interesting to see where we do go next. You know, the album is dying as a format. We're so used to it and we're so old school in that format, but will we get more mileage by doing a few new songs at a time, or do we do another album? It's hard to say what the future holds, and it's just changing so rapidly. It's always hard to speculate where you're going to go."
"I put my votes in...Certainly with Deep Purple and Yes and Nirvana, I think they're all candidates, and I think Kiss deserves to be in there, too. We have lots of great memories of working together with them, and I think they've been influential and worked for a very long time and worked very hard. I think for all the indifference we had before, actually going through it and feeling the love in the room and the sense of community we felt with all the other musicians that are in there, it's a good thing provided it's inclusive and it's broad."
Congratulations to Alex Lifeson, winner of this year's "Spirit Of Prog" award at last night's Classic Rock Awards held in London. "Anyone who doesn't know Rush is Canadian can probably figure it out about four seconds into their 1981 video for "Limelight." It begins with a wolf running in front of a hopelessly remote house, practically lost in a mountain of snow. There don't appear to be any neighbors around for at least one hundred miles and inside, the Canadian trio is playing in front of a large window that looks out into the vast Canadian wilderness.
"Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson grew up near Toronto and they cut their teeth on the local club circuit. They live there to this day, though drummer Neil Peart now spends much of his time in Los Angeles with his wife and young daughter" - RollingStone.com, November 13, 2013
"Live albums are very important for Rush and they became sort of a closing chapter for us. And the way things used to work was we would do three or four studio albums and then we would do a live album and in that way kind of make it a historical document as to where the band was at in that period of time. We never expected that we would just keep going, you know, the lifespan of a band is unpredictable, and so it appeared for quite a while that every four records would be followed up with a live record and it’s a way for us to look back at that last period and see how our sound has changed and take a different approach to recording live every time. But now the record industry has changed so much and DVDs have become such a fantastic souvenir of any one tour. And because it takes so much effort to design and put on one of our tours we feel it’s appropriate to record every new tour that we do, that has a new stage show, and a DVD seems to be the perfect outlet for that. It’s great for us as a historical document and it’s great for our fans as a souvenir of that tour that they came to." - Geddy Lee, VH1.com, October 17, 2013
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