Geddy Lee has revealed why Rush does not have a collection of unreleased music to be packaged into a retrospective collection.
“No, there’s nothing,” Lee confirmed to Rolling Stone in a new interview. “There’s nothing there. There’s nothing left. There might be half-finished demos somewhere where we got halfway through and went, ‘Oh, this song sucks.’ And it never got made.”
He continued: “Some of those things may not even be in a stage that there’s drums on them. You’d know when you’re working on a song if you’re beating a dead horse. If that song wasn’t really coming together – and especially with me as I got older – I had less patience for staying with a song that obviously wasn’t working.
“Sometimes you come in the next day, and Alex [Lifeson] and I would be working on a demo, and we’d go, ‘What the f**** is this song, anyway?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know. I’ve forgotten why we were doing it.’ So you just trash it… We didn’t record anything and then at the end say, ‘No, that doesn’t make it onto the record.’ Those things don’t exist at all.”
Lee’s latest comments echo previous statements from the band. Following drummer Neil Peart’s death in January 2020, both Lee and guitarist Lifeson had reported that there was no vault of unheard material with the late drummer.
