Remember back in the day when you had to search for a year and a half to find even the tiniest blurb about Rush in the news? Looks like that changed - there have been a million interviews with both Geddy and Alex all over

• Geddy in Entertainment Weekly - I posted a link to a shorter version earlier, this one is online and has more questions.
• Geddy in Blender- He took fan questions, and most of them are pretty unusual.
• Alex in Premier Guitar - Lots of guitar hardware geekery in this one.

(Thanks to RushIsABand.com.)

I’m really starting to hate the term “widget”. It is one of those ambiguous bandwagons every tech company is jumping on, like Ajax or App Stores or whatever else. There are currently 863 different ways to do widgets, and none of them are compatible with each other.

But, here’s a good example of a widget: Read the rest of this entry »

Geoff Tate has written a column in Military.com called “Thank a Soldier”. Check it out here: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,187049,00.html.

It’s basically an explanation of how their new album came about: he sat down with his dad, a Korea and Vietnam vet, and video-taped their conversation about his experiences in those two conflicts. He decided to write a song about this, and then started having conversations with other veterans.

I’m still very curious about this album. I’ve never been into Tate’s political ramblings, and it seems like he’s done a strange about-face in his leanings. Maybe his views have changed? Or he’s learned some from his father’s experiences? I guess we’ll hear more when this album comes out…

What is Chickenfoot?

It’s a band featuring Joe Satriani, Sammy Hagar, Anthony Michaels, and Chad Smith. And according to Joe Satriani’s web site, they will have a new album coming out real soon.

Stay tuned to http://www.myspace.com/thechickenfoot for more info - there’s a very brief teaser up already.

The clip sounds decent, but this interests me in a purely “fantasy band lineup” aspect. This is essentially the Van Hagar lineup, with a different drummer and with Eddie replaced by Joe. Although I imagine they will be doing entirely bluesy jam-band stuff, which isn’t my favorite. We’ll see.

How do you follow up one of the best prog metal concept albums of all time? That was the monumental task in front of Queensryche when they finished touring in support of Operation:Mindcrime and started recording their fourth full release, Empire, in the spring of 1990. Would it be a sequel to the concept album? Would we find out who killed Mary? Would it be an even heavier rocking album? Or would the band to in another direction? Luckily, the band chose the latter, and did an exceptional job of reaching the next level in their musical definition.
Read the rest of this entry »

The March 20, 2009 Entertainment Weekly has a one-page article about Geddy Lee, the new Rush collection Retrospectives III, and the band’s appearance in the new movie I Love You, Man., Check out a scan of the article here. thanks to Rushisaband.com. 

I never knew Geddy is a wine fanatic, but I did know he was into baseball.  This article mentions that he goes to check his fantasy baseball stats during drum solos!  Here’s a good 2007 article from ESPN about his love for baseball.

Dream Theater’s next album will be called Black Clouds & Silver Linings, and is due out June 23. In addition to the standard CD, it will released in a special “you have too much money and will buy anything with DT on it” 3-CD edition, which will include a play-a-long CD with no lyrics, and a CD of cover tunes.

Track listing:

01. A Nightmare to Remember
02. A Rite of Passage
03. Wither
04. The Shattered Fortress
05. The Best of Times
06. The Count of Tuscany

Also, below is a fairly confusing leak from the Eddie Trunk show that skips all around the album and gives you a feel for what’s happening without providing more that two consecutive seconds of usable music. Yeah, sucks, but at least you can hear vaguely what they’re doing.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something I never saw before: original LP versions of Rush’s Fly By Night album had the lyrics on the inner LP sleeve.  The cool part - these were copies of hand-written lyric sheets by Neil Peart!

Andrew Olson was kind enough to scan copies of his album lyrics, and they are here.  Neil has pretty arty-looking print handwriting.  He also adds a little drawing or doodle at the top of each song, and signs them “NP”.  The song “Rivendell” also has some Hobbit runes at the bottom.  Also, each song says where it was written, since at this point, the band was still touring constantly, and writing lyrics in hotels and motels. (They also listed cities like this on Caress of Steel, as I mentioned in my review.)

Check this out - it’s very cool!!

(Via RushIsABand.com)

So the Garage Days Re-Revisited EP is long out of print, and is going for a bajillion dollars a bootlegged copy on eBay ten years later. The band decided it would be a good idea to re-issue the record, but add some new stuff to force both new and old fans to buy the album and finance Lars Ulrich’s Picasso fetish. So they made this a two-CD set, consisting of all the old and unreleased b-sides and other rarities, along with a CD’s worth of new studio renditions of covers of old favorites from the band’s influences.

If you’re a fan of the Load-era Metallica, this is a win-win; you get all of the really old b-side stuff you never bought because you were either seven years old when it came out or because you were a Vanilla Ice fan back then and didn’t like metal until it became popular. As far as the new stuff, the song that got video rotation (yes, they made videos for covers on a b-side wrapup compilation) was the Bob Seger classic “Turn the Page”. As much as I loathe James Hetfield’s new “yeaahh yeahhh!” singing style, it works well on this, and provides us with one of those “the road is rough” moments like Poison and Motley Crue belted out consistently, except it feels much more genuine. If Lars Ulrich were killed in Cliff Burton’s bus accident and the band eventually slowed down to just doing songs like this, I’d probably still like it. I couldn’t get through the first side of the disc more than once or twice though, and admittedly, I only cared about having all of the rarities in one place.

The collection of b-sides is great, but it also shows you how far Metallica has fallen. It starts with Garage Days in its full glory, followed with “Am I Evil” and “Blitzkrieg”, before going into the …Justice singles, “Breadfan” and “The Prince”. That’s where I stopped collecting as a kid. Then you get the “new” sounding covers, which are so-so, and the four Motorhead covers from Lemmy’s birthday where Metallica dressed up as Lemmy, which are pretty sad.

If you need the old covers, grab a copy (read my separate review for Garage Days…) That’s the only reason to spend money on any post-black album Metallica, and it’s a bad trap to get you to buy a CD of crappy stuff along with it.

Review: 6