Zitat des Tages von Neil Peart:
I am the audience. I want to observe people. Even when I'm playing drums onstage, I'm watching people. I'm looking at them and their faces and their T-shirts and their signs. And travelling by motorcycle, especially, the world is just coming at me.
I think, in music, you're always hoping that you'll have a like-minded audience and that the music you like making will appeal to them, too.
When Mr. Ludwig invented the bass-drum pedal, that's what made the drum set possible.
If I have to travel, I'm going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I'm going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.
I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.
I'd be very honored to be the ambassador to drum solos.
Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.
It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level... I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling... things that require stamina, not finesse.
Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.
I'm still no good at ball-and-stick games. If I go play golf with the guys, it's intended to be a joke.
Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won't. I wish it were so, and I live that way. I help panhandlers, but other people are, 'Oh look at that - why doesn't he get a job?' While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'
Too much attention and hoopla doesn't agree with my temperament.
I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to... take yourself out of the game.
To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It's very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.
I believe in taxation and health care that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don't want people to have to suffer. It's as simple as that.
I'm learning all the time. I'm evolving all the time as a human being. I'm getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.
Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed.
I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.
If you've got a problem, take it out on a drum.
You have to know when you're at the top of your particular mountain, I guess. Maybe not the summit, but as high as you can go.
The government's only functions are to protect the rights of the individual; therefore, you need a police force and an army.
Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'
When I started playing, I played in R&B bands. I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that.
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.
For me to call myself a musician, it's necessary to play live, and it rewards so much - not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour - I feel it at the end of a tour - all that I've gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.
The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold.
The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today - in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.
I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums.
