Geddy Lee

“I'm a big believer of daylight in the studio.”

“I liked the fact that I was forced to get inside of my emotions and to really try to figure out a lot of what I was going through.”

“First of all, when you live in a country like Canada, it's quite different from America in the sense that it's very tied to traditions that were born in Britain.”

“Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.”

“I would like to shift more into writing for and producing people.”

“When I usually go to my studio to work, I start with something that is going to take two minutes just to put some idea down and the next thing I know, ten hours have gone by and my family is screaming at me because they want me to come up to have dinner with them.”

“It's a battle between record company, between producer and between mastering engineer. Because the louder you make your record in a digital process, the more dynamics are squished out of it. Nobody knows exactly what happens, but the dynamics in the performance disappear, and everything is at the same volume.”

“Certainly my personality, my sense of humor, my outlook on life was informed by the experiences of my parents and the stories they shared with me.”

“It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.”

“Rock and Roll does have its limits as far as the aging process. You want to go out there and play while you're at your peak, right? I think that's encouraging us to keep going out on the road - to maximize the playing at the moment.”

“For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.”

“If you have some magical chemistry that actually find the music you make compelling, that is a big bonus.”

“For me, there is a lot of room for improvement and there are a lot of things I would like to be better at.”

“Something happens when you become an elder rock & roller and you're still functioning. People start to give you awards and recognize achievements. It's the life achievement period of your career.”

“I think, basically, the music industry is scattered and in a mess. I think you've got lots of people that are so-called 'experts' that have no idea where it's headed.”

“Live albums are very important for Rush, and they became sort of a closing chapter for us.”

“With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.”

“I have such an extreme attitude about work, where I can just completely be derelict of my responsibilities and then when I am not derelict, I am completely indulged in it. I swing pretty wildly from the two extremes.”

“The first song that made me interested in music was 'Oh, Pretty Woman' by Roy Orbison. It was the guitar intro, that riff, that I really liked and made me listen in a different way.”

“When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.”