I enjoyed reading about how my favourite album came about and getting a window into the process. The author distills interviews over the years to create this picture. ( )

So, this book actually chronicles the years that I "discovered" Rush, which, for me, made it more fun. I had a buddy in high school who had been a Rush fanatic, but when I heard Geddy singing Bastille Day, I was not interested. Too screechy.

Fast forward a few years to another friend who was a Rush fan. He pushed Tom Sawyer at me enough and it was a much easier song to love. But it was Subdivisions off their Signals album that yanked me in, wholeheartedly. I'm not much of an Eighties music fan, it's far too synthesized for me, but something about that opening caught me, and the brilliant wordplay (Subdivisions = suburbs, but also, subdivisions = all those various teen cliques). It was the first Rush album I actually bought.

And I never looked back. I even went back and bought the earlier screechy albums, but I still don't enjoy them that much.

Long story short, this is where the Rush story picks me up and is more interesting to me.

And while Popoff ably chronicles this decade, once again, he glosses over some things—Geddy mentions almost losing his marriage because of his unrelenting focus on the creation of one of the albums—that likely have some fascinating backstories, and would provide more insight into the band, while utterly beating other topics to death, and then continuing to beat them until there's nothing but blood and pulp. Things such as...
- The fact that synths and keyboards were increasingly used up to Hold Your Fire before the band began to back them off a touch.
- Alex was out of sorts at having his role as a guitarist diminished at the addition of the keyboard washes
- The synths.
- Alex.
- Synths.
- Alex.

Seriously. The chapter focusing on the making of Signals goes around and around the synth topic. Popoff also has a habit of drawing from various interviews where the same people are saying the same damn things, only slightly differently. For example, Neil talking about loving how Geddy will indicate that he loves certain lyrics, but they need to be adjusted to allow for better singing, and Neil rising to the challenge. It's mentioned a lot.

Still, despite being repetitious, it's still a good, if even more formulaic (search for a producer/get a producer/demo the songs/record the songs/a song-by-song overview/release the album/touring notes) look into one of Canada's greatest bands.

Looking forward to the third (hopefully less formulaic and repetitive) installment. ( )

Limelight: Rush in the '80s by Martin Popoff is a detailed account of the group during this period. Filled with facts and opinions (both his and those of the band members), this work really makes these albums come alive again.

I admit to being one of the fans who prefer their earliest records. My first album of theirs was Fly By Night while I was in high school. I then found their first album, bought it, and bought every one through Grace Under Pressure when they released. While I still liked them, GUP was the album that made me decide not to buy their albums immediately upon release any more, and I only bought a few more after that. So now you know where I am coming from.

Popoff goes into detail on every album as well as the influences that helped form the later Rush sound(s). I think that reading this has given me a better appreciation of what they were doing with the albums I liked less. As expected, I was particularly interested with reading about their albums early in the decade and I was not disappointed.

It is funny how as listeners we often only pay attention to one or two aspects of an artist's music when it is first released. Reading this made me remember some of my thoughts during those years and how, in some respects, they were quite ignorant of many fine points. I also never really bought into genre names too much, I either liked something or I didn't, so liking Rush or Yes didn't conflict with my liking Sabbath or Judas Priest, or even The Eagles for that matter. Progressive was a term I knew then but simply disregarded as being a way to divide music and listeners into warring camps. Anyway...

I recommend this to fans of Rush (whether the 80s was your favorite period or not) as well as readers with an interest in rock history.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Disclaimer: this review is based on an advanced reading copy of the book, courtesy of ECW Press.

I first started listening to Rush in the 90s, so by that time they were already well into their third decade. Over the course of a few years, I acquired each of their albums in no particular order - some of them came from my parents' and uncle's record and cassette collections, some I got because they were on sale or brand new at the time, and the rest were chosen because I was already familiar with some of the songs (from videos, live albums, and other sources). Out of all their albums, it was their mid- to late-80s output that took the most time to grow on me. The 80s saw Rush move from the sprawling, side-long opuses that defined their 70s output to a much more streamlined, keyboard-driven style of rock that - while still uniquely Rush - was a long way from where they were at the start of the decade. But what I find really remarkable was how gradually these changes occurred: any two consecutive Rush albums are more similar than they are different, but there are enough little tweaks to things like instrumentation, song structure, or overall sonic texture to show a band that was never hesitant about pushing the envelope and continuing to evolve from album to album.

Martin Popoff's "Limelight: Rush in the 80s" does a tremendous job of going into very fine detail about the band's second decade. Interviews with each of the band members, their producers, their crew members, and even some of their opening acts all contribute to an overall picture of everything that was going on with the band throughout the decade. Over the years, I've spent a LOT of time listening to, watching, and reading about Rush, and I still found myself learning a ton of new things about the band and their music while reading this book. Some of them were subtle little details, such as the meaning of the different types of water sounds that open and close "Natural Science", or details about each of the people on the Moving Pictures cover; others were much bigger things, like the reason that Geddy Lee started (and continued) singing in a lower range as time went on, or the way that Alex Lifeson's guitar solos were constructed in the studio.

There is also a tremendous amount of detail given about some of their more popular songs such as "The Spirit of Radio" and "Tom Sawyer". I almost wish that every song could be given that kind of treatment, but then the book would easily be a thousand pages long and probably not as much of a joy to read. Overall, I think Popoff has given an appropriately proportionate amount of detail to each album and song in this book (although, should he ever decide to write a "song by song" book where he goes into really fine detail about every Rush song, I would definitely want to read it). Whether you're a hardcore fan of the band's 80s output or are more on the fence about it, I would highly recommend this book - you will very likely learn some new things, and you may come out of it with a changed opinion about some songs or even entire albums. ( )