RUSH prepared for the Fifty Something tour by working through an initial list of 45 songs to arrive at 38 songs performed across multiple nights in each city. The main challenge was bringing new drummer Anika Nilles up to speed on the band’s distinctive, idiosyncratic catalog. In earlier tours, the band had months of preparation focused on selecting a setlist and then rehearsing together before entering full production. For this tour, Nilles had to learn all the songs, while the band also shifted from relying on familiar older material to teaching her how to understand roughly 40 songs from a complex musical style. The preparation process required a different approach than past tours.
"Our initial list was 45 songs. Then you start working through them and still do justice to and which ones are too much of a pain to relearn and which ones you really love."
"In the past, we would plan a couple of months maybe, six weeks, on our own. We'd have a list of about four hours' worth of music. Then we'd sort of whittle it down to what the show would probably be. And then we would have a month together. So you've already prepped, and then we're together for a month, and then we would go into full production somewhere in an arena somewhere for maybe 10 days, and then the tour would start. So we have the benefit of four months, basically, of prep. This time around, Anika had to learn all these songs."
"And one important thing that goes unmentioned is when you're preparing for a tour, when we would prepare for a tour with [late drummer] Neil [Peart], we're working really on new material that we just recorded, because the old stuff we knew. For this tour, we're starting from scratch and we're really teaching an incredibly talented, exciting drummer that comes from a very different school of music how to understand 40 songs from this weird, idiosyncratic band. That's a horse of an entirely different color."
Read at Consequence
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]