Single Greatest Song Of All Time

This song is awesome live and really is a great song to imagine a storm coming and going. The arrangement is outstanding and the time signature changes make a complicated feat to replicate with a band but is fun as hell to play right.

The chords and time sig changes and arrangements of many of Rush's songs, while not mainstream and garnering wide popularity, are musicians' dreams to learn and play and appreciate. If you can play a bunch of Rush stuff very well (especially tight as a band), you can pretty much play anything. That is a fact.

Their usage of other cool unconventional stuff along with complicated time signature changes and variations of 6/7/8 beats per measures while not appearing complicated to the typical non-musician listener is/was genius.

I'm not saying it is the one greatest song ever. Just one of them.

 

Neil Pert, John Bonham, and Keith Moon are my favorite Rock and Roll drummers.

Rush - Freewill

Rush - Freewill



There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance

A planet of play things
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
'The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign...'
Blame is better to give than receive

[Chorus:]
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill

There are those who think
That they were dealt a losing hand
The cards were stacked against them
They weren't born in Lotusland

All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
Kicked in the face
You can't pray for a place
In heaven's unearthly estate

[Chorus]

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet

[Chorus]

 

Rush - Limelight

Rush - Limelight



Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage

Cast in this unlikely role
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact

[Chorus:]
Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme

Living in a fish eye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can't pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another's audience
Outside the gilded cage

[Chorus]

 

Neil Pert, John Bonham, and Keith Moon are my favorite Rock and Roll drummers.


What's even more impressive about Neil Peart is he wrote most all the lyrics to all their songs after the first album (which he wasn't in the band yet).

He's pretty genius. He's also a serious Ayn Rand disciple, admittedly. You can hear it in many of his song lyrics. The Trees is a perfect example using trees as a societal descriptive metaphor. I'm saying no more about it here in this vein, I'm not talking politics here. Note still, the time sig changes and 7/8 bmm in the middle about 2:18.

 

Savant-types types tend to like libertarianism. Neil Peart is like a mathematical musician, with the same sort of thinking processes you find in programmers and engineers. Lots of math-musicians in prog rock too. They also tend to be strongly atheist.

Ayn Rand was full of shit but libertarianism is the only political philosophy that makes any sense to me. The emotion-based philosophies (Republican religiosity and Democrat mother figures) just descend into disgusting caricatures of themselves once they have been in power too long.

 

Music is math and math is music, in many ways. Tom Scholz, an MIT genius, is another example in his music structure, as well as sound structure.

What's interesting is he's always preferred analog signals and used mathematics for signal alignments, wave form comparisons, etc., especially for sound layering and track synchronization. He never liked digital formatting, because you cannot fine tune them to specific wave structures - at least what's more pleasing to the ear (regardless of it's mathematical perfection). He had to be brought kicking and screaming when he was forced to remastering his music to digital when converting them to modern technologies.

 

LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great



Someone Great
LCD Soundsystem

I wish that we could talk about it
But there, that's the problem
With someone new I couldn't start it
Too late, for beginnings
The little things that made me nervous
Are gone, in a moment
I miss the way we used to argue
Locked, in your basement
I wake up and the phone is ringing
Surprised, as it's early
And that should be the perfect warning
That something's, a problem
To tell the truth I saw it coming
The way, you were breathing
But nothing can prepare you for it
The voice, on the other, end
The worst is all the lovely weather
I'm stunned, it's not raining
The coffee isn't even bitter
Because, what's the difference?
There's all the work that needs to be done
It's late, for revision
There's all the time and all the planning
And songs, to be finished[/QUOTE]

 

That is awesome. We won't get music like this today. This survives it's time.

America had it's heyday between 1965 and 1979. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, the overwhelming international distribution of this American music heritage happened during this time. 1969 to 1973 were amazing years, when it comes to English-speaking popular/rock music.

*edit*
I just remembered that Rush is Canadian. LOL

 

Though rush is canadian, most consider them an 'american vein' of rock and roll music, along with plenty other bands/acts that were canadian and from your time period, generally because they gained their popularity in the US and sang in english, of course.