True Story: April 15, Rush shows up for a concert at Gund Arena. Since I wouldn’t have missed it for the world…well, someone owes me the world now, ‘cause I missed it.
However, the next day, words started popping in my head. They began to cluster, but not really join together. Then they started to occasionally rhyme. Then they developed a little meter.
It was about 10:30 a.m. when I began putting pen to paper. Rough as they were, I estimated the band was definitely still in Ohio. Maybe in Cleveland, and possibly still in a suburb. Or maybe with an early breakfast, they could’ve departed and been most the way to Toledo or Columbus by then.
The real x-factor would be lyricist/drummer Neil Peart himself. While guitarist Alex Lifeson and Vocalist/Keyboardist/Bassist Geddy Lee are on the bus, Peart travels alone on motorcycle to each tour stop. An avid reader, I later realized as I was writing this at a bookstore right along Interstate 71, he could’ve easily been riding by. Of course, Rush’s next tour stop could’ve been in Detroit or Pittsburgh, which would’ve had them entirely avoiding I-71.
This is what I ended up with after an hour or so:
All we know is from neurons firing
Products of our natural wiring
Creating from unpredicted cognition
From yesterday to tomorrow’s definition
When you see the balance between art and science
You see we don’t own the world
Instead we’re it’s clients
(chorus)
Living and Dying
Laughing and Crying
Feeling and Thinking
Thirsting and Drinking
Beginnings and endings lead to the transcendings
Of what we think we know
So Stop
And Let it Go
There’s really no difference between a field and a street
We truly never know any people we meet
No answer can be made with a perfect objective
And you’re just left with a noble perspective
Consequences eliminate all possible choices
To with our true eyes or speak our true voices
(chorus)
Key change/bridge
Always under above and above what’s below
It’s either coming too fast or going too slow
There’s nothing to give when it’s too much to take
So either get your fix, or just take a break
The days are too short as the years fly by
It’s every reason to wonder why
Just forget it
Before you regret it
Don’t you get it?
Stop
And let it go
(solo)
(back to original key)
Whether you see it as a blessing or feel like it’s a curse
We’re all physically made from the same universe
It could be pre-ordained destiny or just all random chance
Mystically choreographing these parts in this improvised dance
Discovering what will be the next unknown
All by ourselves, but never alone
As we’re…
(chorus)
Basically, I think I wrote the worst, or at least the most generic Rush song in history. Okay, so it’s not a real Rush song since the band didn’t compose it, but if you know Rush, you can easily see the similarities, especially in the Test for Echo album. It has a definite philosophical and detached aura to it, which the band is well-known for. It certainly has Neil Peart’s high level of academic glossary.
Who knows? It might be good. It does contain a consistent theme, stays true to many lyrical structural standards of the time they helped shape. It’s all up to the reader, and if someone should put music to it and record it (Royalities, guys. Remember…royalties! I can negotiate fairly, but…royalties!), it’ll be up to the listener.
I’ve never really tried to write lyrics before. I tried poetry that wound up being pretty lyrical, but this is my first attempt to approach with the intent of writing lyrics. It probably just needs a little polish. After all, some songs written by Leonard Cohen were tinkered with for over two decades before he was satisfied with them.
What I do remember is thinking as I wrote: “I don’t write like this. I don’t do lyrics, and if I did, I don’t think this would be how I’d do it.” What I knew was that I was writing something I thought could be good, which ultimately is the mark of a professional writer – the ability to write in any style. But the lyrics I wrote above seemed to come too fast for someone as inexperienced as me. Writers often romanticize that the pen does the writing as if it is doing the creating independently of the person holding it. I’ve written things that “developed a life of their own.” But in those instances, I could see my role in guiding the pen through it’s creative process. This? This was like I wasn’t even thinking with my own mind, even in terms of trying to imitate. I, for lack of a better term, was out of my mind while I wrote this. (Clever excuse for it being low quality, eh? At least it’s not overused.)
Since the writing mind is a completely intangible entity, one is almost required to err on the side of possibility. Although we’re required (and sometimes limited) by the medium and language of our choice, if you are to conceive anything, you have to conceive everything. So while there’s no rational evidence my mind was channeling Rush’s lyrical creativity, it becomes completely understandable why I’d want to believe, in more ways than simple wishful thinking.
After all, science does have evidence when they found houseplants can at least detect our emotions. I can’t say I’m more psychically developed than a fern, but I hope I’m more psychologically developed than a fern. So you have to allow for a possibility – as least in conceptual theory – that if a brain wave can be read by an EKG in direct contact with a skull, that maybe that brain wave could make it farther, to the point that it can be understood by a brain it reachers – namely mine. And since we never figured out how a fern can detect emotions as well as display them, maybe I learned a little bit myself that day as a drummer might’ve been, um, “Rush”-ing out of town.
Logically, the only test would be to actually contact Peart himself and ask “Hey, Neil! When you were leaving Cleveland on your last tour, do you remember having any song ideas?” If he did, find what he may remember – if not wrote down – and compare any results.
Moreover, think about what you’re looking at. A screen that displays little lines – curved and straight, attached in various ways – that you’ve been taught to recognize as letters, when put together in certain order are mentally constructed into words, each word representing…a concept! While I can estimate a good chance that my idea, converted into these words using these configured, predetermined straight and curved lines, the idea that you’ll understand it 100 percent as I do is almost unreachably Utopian.
And in that minimal margin lies the conceived possibility that an idea can be transmitted without a tangible medium. If you think about it, all you really have is my testimony, which is independent from yours, and just as intangible as any other theory about how anyone really conceives an idea.
But until then, I’ll probably stick to the ideas that I actually experience germinating in my own mind…unless the ghosts of John Updike or Hunter Thompson want to possess me at another time.
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