In a new interview with Guitar Player magazine, RUSH guitarist Alex Lifeson was asked if he has any plans to play live in the near future.
“I’m not really thinking about that,” he responded. “It’s challenging enough to try to get this album [with CONEY HATCH singer/bassist Andy Curran] out first.
“To be honest with you, I don’t think I have it in me to go on the road,” he continued. “I mean, if it was a handful of shows, that might be kind of fun, but anything beyond that… After 40 years of sitting in hotel rooms, I’m not interested. I’ve had quite enough of that. I do love my home life.
“I thought I would miss being onstage a lot more, but I don’t really. I’ve done a couple of things here and there. Small things — usually it’s a charity event or something like that. It’s kind of fun getting up and playing with other people, but the whole production — the big, giant machine — it doesn’t really hold much appeal to me now.”
Earlier this year, Lifeson discussed the possibility of playing with his longtime RUSH bandmate Geddy Lee again in some capacity.
“Geddy and I started writing together when we were — I don’t know — 14 years old, I guess,” Alex said during an appearance on SiriuxXM‘s Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk. “And we are best friends; I love the guy so much, [and] he means so much to me. And we’ve had this amazing experience of working together as well as being buddies.
“I talk to Ged every couple of days or so. We try to get together for dinner. That’s been a more challenging thing lately. But we did get out once recently. It’s great, ’cause mostly we’re pals. If there’s something that comes up in the future — an opportunity for us to do something — we’ll decide over a cup of coffee what that’ll be. But there’s no urgency or there’s no pre-planned thing now. He’s doing whatever he’s doing, I’m doing whatever I’m doing, and we keep each other informed and stuff like that, but, God, we had such a great history and did so much great stuff together, it’s not really a big deal if, for the rest of our lives, we’re just best friends.
“I know RUSH fans are a unique bunch, and I love them,” he continued. “And certainly everything that we’ve done, we’ve always done to satisfy ourselves before anybody else, and I think RUSH fans understood that and were always very supportive — very critical at times too, but always supportive. And that was the nature of our relationship with our fans — it was a really good two-way relationship.
“But I think, really, RUSH ended in 2015. There’s no way RUSH will ever exist again because Neil‘s not here to be a part of it. And that’s not to say that we can’t do other things and we can’t do things that benefit our communities and all of that. I have lots of plans for that sort of thing that don’t necessarily include Geddy. I get asked this all the time — are we gonna do this, or are we gonna do that? Who knows? All I know is we still love each other and we’re still very, very good friends, and we always will be.”
