Songs I wish I'd written: #6
“Limelight”
by Rush
Yes, yes, say what you will. I grew up listening to progressive rock (what’s a keyboard player who likes guitar to do?), and yes I’ve pretty much grown out of it, but... Limelight. It’s the perfect Rush song.
But first, let’s talk about what we bring to songs. Sometimes we want songs to be a certain way. Sometimes we want the songwriters to mirror our feelings on subjects. And that’s how I fell out of love with Rush for years, because I judged the band on what I wanted them to be, rather than accepting them for what they were.
It was in the early 2000s that I was listening to more things outside of my usual, and looking for lyrics that carried more emotional weight – like Karate, The Weakerthans, Lyle Lovett, and Elbow. I had read about the tragedies in drummer and lyricist Neil Peart’s life and how he retreated from the world on a motorcycle journey, and I was looking forward to hearing some Rush songs with more emotionally charged lyrics. What would Neil Peart write after losing his only daughter and then his wife? Pathos is what I was after. And what I got was Vapor Trails. Not only was the original release a strange mix with difficult melodic choices, but it took a very Rush approach to personal existential struggle. I didn’t sit down with the lyrics, so I didn’t understand what I was listening to. Snakes and Arrows was released next and I walked away from Rush, figuring that they were just too cerebral and not going in a direction I was interested in.
Years later, at the behest of an old friend, I picked up Vapor Trails Remixed and I read the lyrics on their own before I listened to it. Suddenly I understood that the same person who wrote “Losing It” and “Different Strings” wrote these songs. I had to take them out of their musical context first, in order to see them for what they were. (To be honest, the remix helps process them.) They are not the unemotional things I thought them to be.
This was an(other) important lesson in understanding and acceptance. Rush wasn’t what I wanted them to be, they were what they were. And they always had been. So to accept Rush was to accept that they felt that they progressed throughout their career. They made these songs the way they wanted to. I might feel that Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves are their most perfect records, capturing both their ideal sound and writing process, but that might well not be the case to them.
And with that, I had to really understand what I liked about this band. It colored the way I listened to their new (and would be last) records, but it also affected how I listened to their earlier material. And what I found was that everything I like about Rush is in “Limelight,” in one (short) song. Sparse but tasteful keyboards, no need for blatant overdubs, a standard song structure, an unpredictable but architectural guitar solo, a drum part that plays to the song but also drives the song (morphing the pattern over the solo back to the chorus so that you feel the three and then the four and then the three again), a melodic bass line, and that wonderful picking pattern of the guitar in the chorus. The song has its own internal rhythm with a singable vocal melody (that’s not too shrill) on top of it. Those are things I love about Rush songs, and they’re all here.
Beyond that, this song was everything I wanted Vapor Trails to be: a confessional, an expression of idealism and solitude, and an insight into the author in a way that I could understand. I just never recognized it for that until years later, because it was packaged in a pop song.
(And for years, I thought the last line of the chorus was ”beyond the life we lead.“ Huh. Live and learn. It pays to listen.)
lyrics
Living on a lighted stage approaches the unreal
for those who think and feel
in touch with some reality beyond the gilded cage
Cast in this unlikely role, ill-equipped to act,
with insufficient tact,
one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact
Living in the limelight,
the universal dream,
for those who wish to seem
Those who wish to be
must put aside the alientation,
get on with the fascination,
the real relation, the underlying theme
Living in a fisheye lens, caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend
All the world’s indeed a stage and we are merely players,
performer and portrayers,
each another’s audience outside the gilded cage
Living in the limelight,
the universal dream,
for those who wish to seem
Those who wish to be
must put aside the alientation,
get on with the fascination,
the real relation, the underlying theme