Far and Near: An Interview with Neil Peart
By Phil Simon, Huffington Post, October 9, 2014
From a very early age, I've been a fan of the Canadian trio Rush. I recently had a chance to sit down with Neil Peart, the band's longtime drummer and lyricist. A prolific writer, Peart has just published Far and Near: On Days Like These, his latest collection of observations and stories.
He was kind enough to send me a signed copy and I've been poring through it. Like his other texts, one not need to be a Rush fan to appreciate Peart's story telling. It's a beautiful text, rife with interesting photos, anecdotes, and factoids, as well as the occasional political commentary. For instance, the 2013 government shutdown of national parks nearly derailed Peart's travel plans.
The following are excerpts from my interview with him.
Tell me a little about your new book.
This is a sequel to Far and Away, which was a collection of stories that I wrote for my website over a period of about three to four years. This, similarly, recollects my touring adventures on the road by motorcycle, some of sojourns at home, whether adventuring around in California or up in Quebec, Canada. Basically, they're open in the sense that anything that I care enough about to work on can go into those stories.
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. That's the same way that I approach the stories. Just as we play our music for an ideal listener as it were, I have an ideal reader in mind who's interested in nature like I am, interested in physical activity like I am, and human history. On other things along the way I try not to spread the audience too thin. If I find an interesting story somewhere, I'll just leave a hint and say, 'For anyone who's interested, there's a good story here.' I won't spend half a page for those who don't care.
It occurred to me too that that's what education should be. We should go to children and say, "There are some interesting things over here if you want to learn about plants or bugs or rocks or dinosaurs." Not all of them will. Why bore them all with a subject that only a few of them are interested in?
That's the approach that I take in the stories. I take a lot of care in the editing of them and the presentation of them on my website first. I then gather three or four year's worth of them, which essentially combines artistic adventures as well as adventures in the wild, wild world.
Beyond your observations, there are some really great photos in the book.
The book is a collection, a hybrid of photographs and words. Over the years, I have found better and better ways of marrying the two and to think ahead. Oh, in that story, I'll probably want a picture of that landscape or that moment. It's something that has grown over time, not only to be a consuming art form for me but immensely satisfying - everything I want to write about, everything I want to share.
Most of it comes from enthusiasm in the true sense - things that get me excited I hope other people will get excited about too if I can just write them right. And that's always true with music. It's not the music you hear in your head that other people are going to hear. You have to be able to make it true enough to the image in your head and that's where technique and technology come in for sure and knowledge. It's not true and will never be true that someone who knows nothing can sit in a basement and make great music. It can never happen with any kind of great art. It takes a much bigger point of view than that. It doesn't just take technique, of course. It doesn't just take technology. They're all tools that translate the music in your mind to the ears of another person - the visions in my mind through words and pictures to the imagination of another person.
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. So if I were less in the past it would be sad. It's like when people ask me my favorite record, my favorite Rush album. How horrible it would be if I had to say something from thirty years ago. How embarrassing, right? Well I did something good thirty years ago but it's been pretty much downhill since. No, no! I couldn't live with that.
You're kind of reminding me of the Mark Twain quote about a teenager who thinks that his parents don't understand him well. Twenty years later he remarked that they learned a lot.
Exactly. That's a good one, yeah. It was about his father, I think. When I was 21 I couldn't believe how much my father had learned (laughs).
Talk to me a bit about the subtitle of the new book. It seems that the phrase holds special significance for you.
Remarkably so, yeah. It came about as so many beautiful things do: by accident. I was just reading an English magazine about old cars and in two cases the journalists were driving old Lamborghinis and were saying, "I felt I should be hearing 'On Days Like These' by Matt Monro." I kind of knew who Matt Monro was, a Sinatra-type singer, but I hadn't heard of the song. I just presumed that it was about beautiful days like these and I'm driving a beautiful Lamborghini around the English countryside. But, in fact, the song was the opening theme for the original of The Italian Job written by Quincy Jones. The lyrics were by Matt Monro's manager. Imagining anyone's manager being a lyricist? It still blows me away. But he wrote a lot of good songs; he was good at it.
The song has a mood about it. Watching the opening of that movie, Rossano Brazzi is driving an old Lamborghini over the Alps. Beautiful music is creeping in under the engine. The music just became one of those sound bytes, not an earworm. It never annoyed me. As I rode though Iowa or the English countryside or the Rocky Mountains or the Great Plains, that sound would be in my head (my helmet) playing all day long. I loved the words for it and the mood that it carried to me all the time. I still get it all the time.
I just loved the way the words on days like these resonated.
In the book, you do quite a bit of wordplay. For instance, I didn't know that word casino is from the Italian word for gathering place.
(Laughs.) That was a story about Catalina Island off the coast of California. They have a beautiful old Art Deco-style building built in the 1920s. They call it the casino but there was never gambling there. I was curious. When I find a situation like that I go, "What a minute! What?" I had to do the research and find out those things.
Research, of course, nowadays is all about keystrokes. Good research means that you start with those links and keep going and going. Serious scholars point that out now. You cannot really just research on Wikipedia. As much as I love Wikipedia and support and contribute to it, you can't stop there. That's a beginning for real research.
When I'm looking into writing something about nature or history, I really have to make sure that I get my facts straight.
There's another example from that same story. There was a place called Prisoner's Bay on one of the Channel Islands. I loved that name. It was right out of The Hardy Boys or something. I wanted to find out why it's called that. There was a simple story that some prisoners were marooned there during the Spanish era and then they disappeared, but the real story is way more complex and it took a lot of research to find out what really happened. The irony is that no one knows what really happened. There are other versions of that story that, when I wanted to write properly, I had to incorporate.
The same thing happens when I write about birds and animals. I want to get it right - and people for that matter. It takes a lot of thought and a lot of refinement and a lot of careful writing to put that forward.
I just ran into a quote the other day from Wallace Stegner, one of my all-time favorite Western writers. He said, "Hard writing makes easy reading." Man... that is so good. I can't believe that I never ran into it until now, but that is again the way that I approach it. I spend a lot time working over the words and pay an editor to help me get that clear. I have my test readers like Kevin J. Anderson does too - people he trusts to make sure that he's getting across what he thinks he's getting across.
It's like what I said about music before. It's not science (laughs). The fact that you can have a vision in your brain and try to describe it and transmit it doesn't mean that it's received. That's the gift of technique and perhaps it's easier explained in prose - in words - if you can get just the right words. In the primary instructional books of writing, the order of things the reader has to know, how to present and render a scene in the way that the reader needs to do it to see what you are seeing. That's the simple definition of technique in that sense. Maybe if people have trouble with the natural musician idea, imagine someone who's never written anything thinking that they can go in a basement and produce a great novel.
There is no such thing as a natural writer in that sense - without some type of schooling (often journalism, often a lot of failed unpublished words). For myself, I wrote for 20 years before I published and I'm so glad that I had all that practice. I'd go on a trip and write a little diary of it and share it with my friends and all that. I was learning how to do it and I've had good teachers - and the same with music all throughout my career with drumming.
Writing and music have to be learned over time and practiced. The great thing about live performance, at least in music (and that prose writers miss out on), is that you have an audience to judge how well you're doing. That's one of the great things that we've had.
Our background is in performance and I've come to realize in more recent years that our songs were written to play live. It seems like a simple thing but it's not. 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 mean, there were rare exceptions in songs that we allowed to be a studio experiment. Thinking of most of the middle period of our songwriting, arranging, and recording, it was all to play live. All of those songs were made so we could still play them 30 years later - and like them. And that's a great thing. On none of our songs now do we go, "Awww, I don't want to play that again" because we still like those songs and we still like playing them in the physical, technical sense. A lot of them are a real challenge to get through. I take a deep breath before I start into them. And when you do them well you feel good. That's an enduring reward we didn't know we were getting ourselves into.
Click here to order Far and Near: On Days Like These.