The Rush song Alex Lifeson struggled to play live: “It is a favourite of ours”

Posted On December 22, 2025December 22, 2025

Since day one, Rush were never satisfied taking the easy road in rock and roll.

Throughout every iteration of the band, the Canadian power trio looked to shatter the common perception of what rock was supposed to be, moving into different areas that no one had thought possible on albums like 2112 and Moving Pictures. While most artists would stick to the same formula, one song presented the band with the ultimate challenge whenever they played live.

When looking through the band’s catalogue, throwing a dart and finding something insanely challenging to play is easy. Throughout the album Hemispheres alone, the band ultimately broke down trying to figure out how to play the song ‘La Villa Strangiato’, eventually giving up and deciding to play it in three parts before transposing it on the live stage.

In the wake of the epics that populated their glory years, though, the band wanted to run away from the traditional way of making progressive music. Kicking off the 1980s, Permanent Waves saw the band getting in tune with the sounds of punk and new wave, featuring reggae influences reminiscent of acts like The Police on ‘The Spirit of Radio’.

By the time they got out on the road trying to hash out how to play the songs, the group started to assemble material for their next album by looking at the jams they would get up to during their soundchecks. When Geddy Lee and Neil Peart were jamming one day, one of the ideas that came up with turned into their trademark instrumental, ‘YYZ’.

Named after the Toronto airport code, the initial rhythmic structure of the song was based on the Morse Code rhythm that Peart heard when listening to the operations in the cockpit. Once Alex Lifeson was brought into the studio, though, the song turned into something else entirely, featuring some of the wildest playing of his career. 

The song’s conception was that of pure chance and is a perfect distillation of what made Rush the experimental kings. “We were flying into Toronto on a private plane and heard the Morse code beep, and that became the founding rhythm of the song. “

Peart was always able to take inspiration from anywhere and this song is certainly similar. “It was a soundtrack about airports, the bustling part, the very emotional part of it, you know, re-greeting each other, and all the laments. That was a conscious thing, to try to weave in some of the moods of airports into the song”.

Since most of the song is based around the idea of travelling, the various exotic scales that Lifeson weaves in between the verse sections give the song a feeling of venturing into new lands, especially when Lee accompanies him on the keyboards before going right back into the insistent riff.

When talking about the album for the series Classic Albums, Lifeson would say that one of the joys of playing  ‘YYZ’ is because of how much it tests the band’s abilities saying: “‘YYZ’ is always a challenge when playing live, and for that reason alone, it is a favourite of ours. Because you always want to feel challenged whenever you go onstage”.

Compared to the band’s classic mainstream material, though, ‘YYZ’ has eclipsed even the band’s poppiest offerings. When playing to massive stadiums worldwide, fans are more likely to sing along to the various riffs in the breakdowns, with everything going silent when everything drops out for one of the members’ lead breaks. Even though Rush has been able to play various types of music throughout their tenure, this is about as pure to the band’s sound as they would ever get.

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