Now that Rush’s 20th studio album, “Clockwork Angels,” is out, the band is turning its attention to planning for their upcoming tour, which kicks off September 7th in Manchester, NH.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson explains the challenge the group has creating a setlist when they have such a huge catalogue of material to choose from.
“It's very difficult,” says Lifeson. “We want to play the new material. We sort of go back and forth. ‘Should we play the whole thing? Or should we play most of it, or some of it, and mix it up?’ It's always very difficult, and having come off a tour where we featured an album in its entirety, it makes the idea of featuring the whole of ‘Clockwork Angels’ that much more appealing.”
“I think for the first leg of the tour, at the very least, we'll do most of the record – not all of it, but we'll do most of it,” Alex continues. “The material that's coming up amongst the three of us in the e-mails that we're sharing is the older material. There's a lot of stuff in there that we haven't played before, and we haven't played in a long time so it's got a freshness to it this time around. We'll always have to play that handful of songs that we've had the most commercial success with, but mixing it up with some other material that we haven't played in a long time is really great. It's shaping up to be a pretty good set.”
Rush have toured a great deal in the past decade, which gives the band an energy that they can continue to build on with each new outing.
“[It gives us] a new energy and confidence, more than anything,” agrees Lifeson. “We just feel really good about where we're at. The show that we're working on now, the production stage has been kind of crazy trying to get it ready in time for September, and then the rehearsals starting in July. It's all a little much, but I know in a couple of weeks when we start to get into that schedule, we'll start to groove and feel very good and there's something about that confidence that comes – maybe with maturity, maybe because for the last 10 years we've been playing as much as we've been playing. We really feel like we put it together really well these days.”
Read the full Lifeson session at Rolling Stone here.
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