Lifeson composed the elegiac instrumental “Western Sunset” to close out the album, with his bandmates ceding him the spotlight to express his heartfelt emotions.

I loved making a record that is so much about the rhythmic aspect of it, that’s trippy in a very visual sense.” We would build the tracks up until we felt that it reached its pinnacle and then we moved on. “We spent probably a year working together remotely,” Lifeson explains. The finished product displays clear chemistry among the players, no small feat since they mostly worked from a distance. They were for me very much driven by Maiah’s vocal.” I was completely open to experimenting and trying to make the guitar sound less like a traditional guitar, and more like a rhythmic and sonic element that was within the context of these songs. “It freed me up knowing there was another guitar player covering some of the melodic issues that I would normally have to.

I really liked all of his parts and didn’t want to redo them. I got to listen to what other people were doing in this context, including another guitar player with Alf. “It was relaxing and much broader an experience for me personally. “There wasn’t a heavy emphasis on typical arrangements that Rush would do,” he muses. If you occasionally have a hard time locating Lifeson’s guitar in the stew, that’s OK with him. The self-titled debut album from Envy of None is a spicy mix, with Wynne’s ethereal confessionals fitting into sometimes foreboding yet consistently groove-worthy rhythmic structures. Loving what he heard, Lifeson went back in and reworked his parts while second guitarist Alfio Annibalini joined to make it a quartet. The process ramped up when Curran met singer-songwriter Maiah Wynne, who started adding vocals to the tracks. The novel opportunity arrived via tracks sent to him by bassist Andy Curran, a member of the ’80s band Coney Hatch and afterward an A&R man who dealt directly with Rush. When Rush stopped touring in 2015 due to drummer Neil Peart’s health problems (he passed away in 2020), Lifeson kept his antennae up for something new. This was fresh and new for me.” Expanding Envy “The whole Rush experience was very different. “It’s not Rush,” Lifeson says as a way of explaining Envy of None.

Rush band limelight