When Rush drummer Neil Peart passed on 7 January 2020, the outpouring of love and respect was quite extraordinary. Peart was known as a private man, but also as a compassionate, thoughtful, and respectful one.
Everybody were queuing to share tributes and stories underlining all of these attributes about him. Those who never interacted with him would pay tribute to his extraordinary skills as a drummer, author, and songwriter.
Peart was known as the primary lyricist for Rush, contributing the lion’s share of lyrics after joining the band in 1974. Upon his passing, his lyrics were widely used by fans around the world in tribute. Some of them felt particularly fitting:
Suddenly you were gone
From all those lives you left your mark upon
These are the opening words to the song Afterimage, the second song on their tenth album Grace Under Pressure (released 12 April 1984).
The track was written about (and dedicated to) Robbie Whelan, a friend of the band who worked as an assistant engineer at the Le Studio in Laurentian mountains where Rush recorded several of their albums. He was involved on several Rush albums, most notably Moving Pictures (1981) and Signals (1982).
Whelan was driving on the way to the Le Studio in 1983 when he had an accident and was killed. To say that this coloured the upcoming sessions for the band’s next album is an understatement.
Whelan was not just involved on the production side, but became a friend and was part of their personal lives. Amongst other things, he taught Peart to cross-country ski and skied with him to work at the studio often.
There are few quotes about this song from its lyricist. When the album was released, Peart did some interviews with very interesting track-by-track discussions, but this song was usually skipped. It is understandable, with the song containing very personal and sad memories about the loss of a friend and the emotional aftermath that follows. It may not have needed further comment.
Guitarist Alex Lifeson offered the following about the song when asked at the time: “[It was written to] a friend of ours, Robby Whelan, from Le Studio. He was one of the tape operators at the studio. This guy was so together, he was amazing. He really knew everything that was going on there, he was a wonderful person who loved life to the fullest. Unfortunately he was killed in a car accident a year ago, so it was a song for him.”
…and perhaps that is all we need to know? The rest is all there in the lyrics.
I remember
The shouts of joy
Skiing fast through the woods
I hear the echoes
I learned your love for life
I feel the way that you would
I feel your presence
I remember
I feel the way you would
I feel the way you would
I feel, I feel the way you would
This just can’t be understood
It is noteworthy that for such a sad and poignant topic, the music that is accompanying these words is driving, energetic, and even bombastic at times. This may have felt more fitting to the person they were paying tribute to than a sad, slow, teary-eyed song would have. Which, in any case, would not have been fitting of Rush either.
As bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee explains, finding the right music to accompany a set of lyrics depends on a number of factors: “More often than not, my job is to draw some sort of musical mood out of a lyric. Usually I’m orchestrating lyrics that are already written. However, with a song like Between the Wheels [from Grace Under Pressure], we came into the rehearsal studio and we played so emotively that they inspired Neil to write the words. On the other hand, the lyrics for Afterimage were already written. They were very personal and it was very important that the right notes, the right melody, be found. That was a case of writing strictly to the lyric, and by the way, that song was written mostly on keyboards. When I’m not playing bass, I play the bass lines on the keyboard now. For Afterimage, I play all the bass lines in the left hand. Almost every time I had a right-hand keyboard part, I would write a bass pattern for the left hand, even if it was basic, just to get into the habit of doing it. That way I could set up different bass sounds too.”
Alex Lifeson expands on the recording approach of the group: “We do basic tracks together as a three-piece: rhythm guitar, bass, and drums. Then I almost always redo my guitars because then I can pull the amps out of the booth.”
Geddy Lee adds: “On past albums there were always a few parts where it was strictly sound effects. There are a couple of moments on this record where the same thing happens.”
They are however not concerned about not being able to replicate the music they make live. Alex says, “When we have a guitar solo, I am tempted a lot of times to put rhythm guitar in the background, because I love the way the interaction between rhythm and lead guitar sounds. But it’s not realistic in terms of a pure trio sound, so we never do it. This was the first record where we went outside a bit and layered keyboards and did some stuff that we couldn’t do live. But I don’t think we lose that in the show.”
Geddy adds: “In Afterimage I used a combination of a vocal sound and a human voice and played a few random melodies that overlapped the main part, which created some emotional peaks and valleys. There’s nothing like doing that spontaneously; I think that’s part of the magic of making records. When you’re playing a part with a sound that you love, almost anything you play sounds beautiful. Listening to a piece of music that’s well structured and trying to spontaneously fit notes in to make your emotions rise, that’s the magic of recording I love best.”
Alex Lifeson would apply a similar approach to most guitar parts on the album, but Afterimage was one of the more straightforward ones. He said, “I didn’t use anything special for the melodic lines in Afterimage – after Geddy sings ‘I feel the way you would.’ I think we just got a hot sound that was real compressed, loud, with lots of echo on it. After that, there’s a muted picking section. I muted the strings with the side of my palm and just picked in a downstroke. The volume swells before the solo are all keyboard – the real ethereal kind of sounds are all PPG [Geddy’s German-made keyboard synthesizer, a 2.2 model]. The guitar is only doing chords there. I used chords in the solo because I wanted to approach it differently and get a little more value out of the chords. I think it works well; there’s a good combination of chords going into a melodic line at the end.”
To help Lifeson prepare for the recording of the solo, for the first time ever he did some homework on his own. He said, “Grace Under Pressure is the first time I took my trusty Rockman back to the house, where I had a Teac Portastudio and could play tapes of the basic tracks and work on a couple of ideas solo-wise. Afterimage was one of the three solos that I worked on in my spare time. Now, I had basic ideas for those solos right from when they were written – when we were rehearsing – but they did change a fair bit once I got them in my home studio. And then once in the main studio again, it gets a little more magic.”
Recording a song about a dear friend who lost his life will contain moments of poignancy and sadness, making it an emotional experience no matter how prepared you are, as Lifeson is the first to admit: “We wanted to celebrate his life, but there is a sadness to the music, and the guitar solo is a translation of that. I think about him every time we play that song. He worked at Le Studio, so we were right there where he was. We turned the lights down a bit, and I was emotional and excited. I don’t know how many times my eyes got all teary going into that solo when we were running it down. Halfway through, I’d get so fired up that I would go out of time, so we’d rewind it to the front and I’d go [in sobbing voice], “Okay, let’s try it again.” So the solo was like that for me, very gripping. I got tuned in to the lyrics.”
By their own standards, the album took long to finish. They started early November 1983 and finished on 12 March 1984. They had a strict working regime, coming in on a Monday, taking the first Saturday off, and then they didn’t take another day off except for a ten-day break at Christmas.
Lifeson remembers the sessions as focused, but long: “That album was all we had on our minds during that time. It took two months to lay down the basic tracks. It’s a mystery to me why it took so long. We were so prepared and had twice as long as usual to write, rehearse, arrange, and refine the material. We were so confident that we thought it would take us five days. It wasn’t like we were bogged down or held up against the wall in the studio; it just took a while to get the sounds. We usually worked from 2:00 in the afternoon to about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and then everyone would get up about 11:00. I felt most comfortable playing between 9:00 and midnight; those were our peak hours in the studio.”
Rush produced a music video for the song, even though it was only ever released as a single in Japan (with The Body Electric as the b-side).
The video has a poignant moment at the end, where we see Neil Peart sit in silent reflection behind his drums after the song is finished. Knowing how he would have hated to do something as personal as that just for the benefit of cameras, this was more than likely a natural reaction that happened to be captured and ended up being used. It is a very fitting end.
Years later, Neil Peart seemed more open to discuss certain aspects of the song. In 2017 he shared the following in a conversation with Classic Rock Magazine: “Afterimage is based on the idea that when someone goes, there are a number of lives they left their mark upon. The death of Frank Zappa was sad to me because the world needed people like Frank Zappa. And the same is true of a guy named Bernie, who I met when he was leading bird-watching tours in a national park. He had so much knowledge, but he’s not long for this world, and all that knowledge is going to be lost. That’s the tragedy. When some people go, I feel that kind of wrench.
“That’s why I wrote in that song: ‘I try to believe…’ But you can’t believe in that kind of stuff. And I’m well-documented on that subject. In all my songs and in my prose. I was called a faith-basher recently and it went to my heart. I don’t want to be an anything-basher. I don’t like to make enemies.”
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