Art & Creativity Quote by Alex Lifeson

Lifeson frames Rush’s legacy less as a catalog of riffs than as a case study in artistic nerve. The quiet power in his phrasing is the pivot from “our music” to “the way we really stuck to our guns” - a move that shifts influence from sound to stance. He’s talking about a band that made unfashionable choices on purpose: long songs, synth detours, sci-fi themes, virtuosic complexity, all delivered with a kind of Canadian refusal to beg for approval.

The 90s reference isn’t incidental. That decade’s rock culture prized “authenticity,” but often defined it narrowly: grunge’s abrasion, punk’s minimalism, irony as armor. Rush sat outside those trends, and yet bands kept name-checking them. Lifeson suggests why: not because everyone wanted to write 7/8 epics, but because Rush modeled what it looks like to survive cycles of cool without sanding yourself down. It’s influence as permission slip.

There’s also a subtle defensiveness that reads as self-awareness rather than insecurity. “I don’t think it was so much our music” is humility, sure, but it’s also a way of rejecting the idea that influence is strictly technical. He’s arguing that what musicians borrow most readily isn’t a chord progression; it’s the example of a group that kept making the record they wanted, even when the culture told them they were dinosaurs. That’s not romantic rebellion. It’s professional stubbornness - and for a lot of 90s bands trying to outlast their own hype cycles, that’s the more useful inheritance.