Rush’s Geddy Lee opened up about the challenges of rehearsing the band’s classic material with new drummer Anika Nilles and a keyboardist.
Lee discussed the difficulties of returning to songs that hadn’t been performed in over a decade. He admitted that mistakes were made by everyone involved during the rehearsal process, not just the new additions to the lineup.
“We made as many mistakes as [Anika] made, so that made her happy every time we rehearsed,” Geddy Lee said. “And we all have these expressions now when we were making a mistake in the studio or whatever, we just look at each other, like, shock, made a mistake.”
Lee explained that he tried to reassure the newer members before the tour began, emphasizing that recovering from mistakes mattered more than avoiding them.
“One of the things I said to her and Loren before the tour started, I said, ‘Look, these are complicated songs. You are going to make a mistake,'” he continued. “I said, ‘It’s not about the mistake. It’s about how you recover from the mistake. So just play. Just keep playing and don’t worry. There might be a bump in the road, but we’ll just work around it and carry on.’ And I think it helped them relax a little bit, because it’s kind of scary arrangements.”
He went on to describe just how intricate Rush’s music can be for musicians learning the parts from scratch, rather than having written them originally.
“They’re very complicated, and if you didn’t write them, you have to learn them, and it’s very different,” Lee said. “When you write a part, it’s automatically in your DNA. You understand it inside out. But when you’re coming to it to learn it as an outsider, you try to break it down into the laws of music, and our songs don’t adhere to the laws of music strictly. So it can be very intimidating and challenging.”
Lee then recalled a specific example involving the song “A Farewell to Kings,” highlighting how working through the material face-to-face helped Nilles adjust.
“And so I think [Anika] appreciated face to face of being able to work out those parts,” he said. “I remember when we talked about learning ‘A Farewell To Kings,’ and it was that daunting middle section that’s… And she’s very mathematical, so she’s breaking it down into time signatures and I’m going, ‘Well, I just play the riff over and over again until it’s over.'”
Lee said he encouraged Nilles to trust the process and lean on him and guitarist Alex Lifeson for support.
“So I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Figure it out, 6/8, 7/8, whatever you think, a bar of four here. You figure it out. When you get together with Alex and I, we’ll bash it around and it will feel second nature to you.’ And that’s how it comes together,” he said. “And so I think that helped her relax a little bit to know that her two crazy uncles are out there, and we’ve got her back. ‘We’ve got you. Don’t worry. We’ll get you through all the tough parts.'”
Nilles’ path to becoming Rush’s touring drummer did not come out of nowhere, and neither did the collaborative, hands-on learning process Lee describes. Her selection and the broader context of Rush’s return to the stage help explain why these rehearsal room moments carried so much weight for both her and the band.
Nilles earned her reputation as a top-tier fusion and progressive drummer through her work with the late guitarist Jeff Beck, a stint that put her on Geddy Lee’s radar in the first place. Lee has said he heard about her talent secondhand and was immediately struck by what he heard. That led to a quiet, low-pressure tryout in Canada, which he was careful not to call an audition since the band wasn’t yet certain a tour would happen.
That process paid off. Rush announced its return to the road with the Fifty Something Tour, marking the band’s first run of shows since the death of Neil Peart. Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold both stepped into roles once held by founding members. The tour was set to span roughly 90 performances, beginning near Los Angeles.
The payoff of those grueling rehearsals became evident when Rush performed “A Farewell to Kings” live for the first time in nearly 50 years during a Los Angeles show. It was the very song Lee referenced when describing Nilles’ methodical approach to cracking the band’s unconventional time signatures.
Following that milestone performance, Rush publicly credited both newcomers for how they’d been embraced by longtime fans, writing on social media: “Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for making this week so effin’ amazing! For embracing Anika and Loren so profoundly.”
