Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson recently spoke about how working with new drummer Anika Nilles forced them to revisit and relearn the intricacies of Rush’s music, in comments shared via Rolling Stone.
The remarks focused on what the pair discovered about Neil Peart’s drum parts once they had to explain them to a new player. Lee was asked what they learned about the drum parts to Rush songs that they hadn’t quite grasped until they had to communicate them to someone new. He explained how the process became a re-education.
Question: “Alex and Ged, what did you guys learn about the drum parts to Rush songs that maybe you hadn’t quite grokked until you had to communicate them to someone new?”
“We were learning what Anika was learning,” Lee said. “We were realizing how different Neil’s feel is from other styles of play. So through Anika’s experiences, we were understanding Neil’s composition better and better.”
“And sometimes Anika would write me and say, ‘What time is this part in?’ And I would go, ‘F*ck, I don’t know!’ So I would go back and listen to it, and I would count it out,” he continued. “And I realized that we wrote parts as musical passages, and we would do a weird musical passage in an odd time signature, but we wouldn’t need to count what that time signature was, ’cause we would just glue a bunch of phrases together and we knew it intrinsically. We knew it inherently.”
“And whenever we rehearsed it, we just rehearsed the part. So having to explain that to Anika was really hard for me, and I had to go back and say, ‘Well, wait a second. Let me listen.’ And then I would say, ‘Well, I think there’s a bar of eight or a bar of six.’ She’d go, ‘Well, I think it’s all in seven,’ or it was the other way around I think. So it was a re-education for me.”
Lifeson then added his own observation about Peart’s playing.
“And it was more apparent how Neil, by spending so much time, he would just shift his weight so subtly on the front or the back, just leaning this way or just leaning this way,” Lifeson said. “That’s all in between the big stuff. And it becomes really the glue, the basic glue that keeps everything all together. And that became much more apparent.”
The comments came as Lee and Lifeson reflected on adapting Rush’s catalog alongside Nilles. Her arrival marks a major moment for the band. The background to her hiring helps explain why the process was so demanding.
Rush announced Nilles as the touring drummer for its 2026 reunion run on October 6, 2025. The German drummer, composer and educator was 42 at the time. She is best known for playing on Jeff Beck’s final tour. The Fifty Something Tour is the band’s first run of shows in more than a decade. It is also Rush’s first tour since Peart died in 2020.
Lee and Lifeson did not hand her the job quickly. Nilles went through a five-day audition before the two selected her. She made her first live appearance with the band at the Juno Awards in March 2026. Rush opened the show with a performance that put her in front of a national audience.
The task she took on is considerable. Peart worked behind a 360-degree kit that often reached the 30s in components and sometimes topped 40. He played it with unmatched precision. He also composed his drum parts as part of the songs rather than simply keeping time. That approach helps explain why Lee and Lifeson internalized the parts without ever counting them out.
Lifeson’s comments about Peart’s subtle weight shifts also fit his later evolution as a player. In the mid-1990s, Peart reworked his technique with teacher Freddie Gruber. The change smoothed out a once-jagged style and gave his playing a more fluid, flowing motion above the kit.
Nilles has described the opportunity as a privilege. She has also acknowledged the scale of the role.
“It’s truly an honour,” Nilles said of joining Lee and Lifeson on the reunion tour.
