Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson opened up about his fears heading into the band’s comeback tour without late drummer Neil Peart.
Lifeson was asked directly about the experience of returning to the road after Peart’s passing: “Alex, the band sounding excellent and I heard you guys at the Junos and I’m so delighted for you. How is being on the road without Neil? How has it been feeling on the road?” He responded with a candid look at the anxieties he faced before stepping back on stage.
“It feels fantastic to be honest,” Lifeson said. “I think all the fears that I had starting out whether physically I would be up to it, whether my hands would work as well as I expected because like Getty was saying, you know, you want to go beyond what the previous gig was. Once we started playing and I felt confident and good about my physical condition, I really fell in love with it.”
He went on to speak about his connection with the tour’s new drummer, Anika Nilles, who has stepped in for the reunion shows.
“I love the songs. I love playing with Anika,” Lifeson continued. “A brilliant musician and she’s a wonderful person. She has a great sense of humor. We’ve become really quite close in the two years we’ve been working with her because it has been a while. I’m really really excited and I have to admit that I’m maybe perhaps I wasn’t quite so excited when it was just a concept.”
“I just had reservations about it, mostly health related reservations, but I got my health in order relatively,” he added. “And the key was to be able to play the way I felt I needed to play. So, I’ve just fallen totally in love with it. And now I’m the guy who wants to do more gigs.”
Bandmate Geddy Lee echoed Lifeson’s sentiment. He reflected on how difficult the decision to return to the stage really was and how Peart’s memory continues to shape the tour.
“I know. It’s just unbelievable to hear him say that,” Lee said. “But, you know, it wasn’t a simple journey to get back on stage, you know, and I know we’re not really here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about Neil, but Neil’s presence is always there. I mean, it really is in so many ways.”
Lee explained how the band honors Peart during performances. He also described the pressure they felt to live up to his legacy.
“I mean, we pay tribute to him during the show, of course, and I try to tell stories about him and try to give people a look behind the songs as to how they came together and what we feel about each other and him,” Lee continued. “But you know, it was a very unlikely thing that we would be back to play together. And of course, at the age that we are, which I will not say out loud, there’s a lot of fear.”
“And what Alex is talking about is that it’s the fear,” he said. “The fear that you’re not going to be as good as you were. The fear that you’re going to let people down. And that is not how you honor your fallen comrade by letting people down. So there was a lot of pressure on our shoulders to be as good if not better than we have ever been and put a show together that would do his tribute justice. So that’s what Al’s talking about. You had those terrified moments.”
Lee closed with a reflection on grief and memory, offering his perspective on how Peart’s spirit lives on through the band.
“Well, when you lose somebody, you know, somebody was asking me the other day about, ‘Do I believe in the afterlife?'” Lee said. “And I said, ‘Well, the afterlife is for people that are still alive.’ You create the afterlife by making that person present, talking about them, remembering them, telling stories about them. That’s how you keep them alive. That is, for me, that’s the afterlife.”
That sense of tribute and renewal runs through the entire reunion, which has been dubbed the “Fifty Something” tour in honor of the 51 years since Rush released its debut album.
The trek kicked off on June 7, 2026, at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, marking the band’s first live performance since 2015. The North American run spans 12 arena shows across seven cities, giving fans their first chance in over a decade to see Lifeson and Lee performing Rush’s catalog live.
Anika Nilles is behind the kit for those shows. She is a German drummer, composer, and educator from Aschaffenburg who began playing at just six years old. She went on to study popular music at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg. She then built a career as a touring and session musician, including a stint drumming for Jeff Beck.
Nilles’ selection as Peart’s successor carries its own weight of expectation, one she has approached with visible humility. Ahead of the tour, she admitted she wasn’t deeply familiar with Rush’s catalog before stepping into the role. That revelation underscores the scale of the challenge she took on in filling one of rock’s most iconic drum thrones.
Canadian fans will get their own moment with the tour when it stops at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on August 7 and August 9. Other major stops include Madison Square Garden in New York and the United Center in Chicago, bringing the “Fifty Something” run full circle as a celebration of Rush’s legacy and Peart’s enduring influence on the band.
Source: Q with Tom Power
