
“Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian.” In later years, the drummer made it very clear that the writing of Rand no longer spoke to him. One of the shorter songs on Hemispheres, it begins like a gentle outtake from a Peter Gabriel–era Genesis album, but builds to a soaring climax before ramping back down to a gentle passage punctuated by Peart’s woodblocks. They insist on completely equal treatment, and wind up destroying each other in the process. The book has provided a political awakening for countless libertarians over the years, and it gave Peart the lyrical inspiration idea for “The Trees.” It’s the story of a conflict between oak and maple trees in a forest. While most superstar rock drummers of the Seventies spent their downtime destroying hotel rooms and getting blitzed out of their minds, Neil Peart liked to chill in his hotel room with a well-worn copy of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. “At the beginning of the movie, the opening lines from ‘Kubla Khan’ were quoted, ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree.’ As research, I looked up the poem, and I was so powerfully impressed by it that the poem took over the song.”
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“The song idea was originally inspired by the movie Citizen Kane,” Peart said in 2010.

And, yet again, the lyrics show him getting carried away with his latest literary obsession. The rest of the song, in which delicate interludes filled with bells and chimes alternate with lean power-trio muscle, epitomizes Peart’s groundbreaking union of scientific precision and ass-kicking force. Setting a mystical mood for a song inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” he complements ambient electronic bird chirps with wind chimes and tubular bells before switching to the drum kit to propel a brain-bending proto–math-rock riff. Rush’s music only grew more ambitious as the Seventies wore on, and just as Geddy Lee began doubling on synths, Peart started to operate like a one-man percussion section. Image Credit: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images


The band’s self-titled debut, their only album with original drummer John Rutsey, featured no-frills hard rock - soulful but unspectacular, especially in a climate where Led Zeppelin were operating at peak strength. The first song on Rush’s second LP announced one of the most momentous member swaps in rock history.
