Rush drummer Neil Peart says the band have no unreleased material left in the vault.
They’ll launch R40 on DVD and Blu-ray in Europe on November 17 which includes live footage of long-lost track I’ve Been Running and The Loser, a song bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee says he forgot about.
But Peart reveals when it comes to studio archives, there’s nothing left to release.
He tells The Strombo Show: “We’ve never given up on a song – we don’t have a single unreleased song in the world. Because if we went far enough, we believed in it, we kept working on it.
“A lot of stuff got thrown away before it got that far or syphoned into other songs. I call my lyrical file the scrap pile, where I go when I’m looking for bits and pieces. And musically we’re the same. If things aren’t happening we throw it away.
“There’s one song on Clockwork Angels, Wish Them Well – three times we wrote that song and threw it away and it was the third version that pleased us all.”
Peart recently returned to the site of Le Studio, Quebec, where the band recorded several of their most important records: Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures, Signals and Grace Under Pressure. And although the studio has been demolished, Peart says he had mixed emotions on his visit.
He says: “On the one side it’s sad it’s gone – it’s especially sad to me that no rock band will ever enjoy that retreat. What it meant artistically and personally to work in the studio all day, then play volleyball at night under the lights – those kind of experiences were so formative artistically and as a collaborative unit.
“So that part was sad. But on the other hand, when I look back now, I’m most proud of our most recent work. Clockwork Angels to me is a lovely plateau to be on and Snakes And Arrows before that, pretty much in decreasing favour, as it should be.
“I really do think we got better and I got better. Naturally I like our most recent work better.”
Peart is currently working with author Kevin J Anderson on Clockwork Lives – a sequel to their Clockwork Angels novel. The drummer is also set to release the second instalment of his autobiography Far And Near: On Days Like These. It launches in Europe on November 20 and is the follow-up to 2011’s Far And Away: A Prize Every Time.
