"Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently"
About this Quote
Geddy Lee is defending ambiguity as a feature, not a failure. Coming from a musician whose band made a career out of lyrics that feel like riddles you can live inside, the line reads less like a casual preference and more like an artistic ethic: a good song shouldn’t arrive with instructions. It should be a room with more than one door.
The intent is practical. If a song can be “taken more then one way,” it lasts longer than the news cycle that may have inspired it. Lee is pointing to replay value: the listener returns at 17, at 27, at 47, and hears a different confession, a different warning, a different joke. That’s not evasiveness; it’s an invitation to collaboration, where meaning is co-authored by the audience’s mood, history, and damage.
The subtext is also a quiet pushback against the demand for clarity that often shadows rock songwriting: explain yourself, pick a side, make it quotable. Lee’s phrasing suggests the opposite impulse: don’t trap the song in a single “correct” reading, because certainty can shrink art into a slogan. Ambiguity protects the emotional core by letting it stay slightly out of reach, like the best melodies that resolve but still ache.
Context matters: Rush operated in a space where “serious” rock and brainy themes could be mocked as pretentious. Multiplicity becomes a way to dodge the sneer and the lecture at once. Interpret it politically, personally, spiritually, romantically - if it holds, it holds. That’s the real flex: durability through openness.
The intent is practical. If a song can be “taken more then one way,” it lasts longer than the news cycle that may have inspired it. Lee is pointing to replay value: the listener returns at 17, at 27, at 47, and hears a different confession, a different warning, a different joke. That’s not evasiveness; it’s an invitation to collaboration, where meaning is co-authored by the audience’s mood, history, and damage.
The subtext is also a quiet pushback against the demand for clarity that often shadows rock songwriting: explain yourself, pick a side, make it quotable. Lee’s phrasing suggests the opposite impulse: don’t trap the song in a single “correct” reading, because certainty can shrink art into a slogan. Ambiguity protects the emotional core by letting it stay slightly out of reach, like the best melodies that resolve but still ache.
Context matters: Rush operated in a space where “serious” rock and brainy themes could be mocked as pretentious. Multiplicity becomes a way to dodge the sneer and the lecture at once. Interpret it politically, personally, spiritually, romantically - if it holds, it holds. That’s the real flex: durability through openness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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