Pick four songs from any band and you can tell a lot about their sound. This summer, I’m featuring #RockBlocks, four picks from bands across various genres. They might be wildly different from each other, but what binds them together is the fact that they’re all a part of my life soundtrack.
Not an easy task picking just four Rush songs for a Rock Block. I could easily dedicate an entire month of Mental Jukebox to the band. But we all know Rush isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s mine, and it has been mine since middle school. Rather than wax poetic about the brilliance of “YYZ” or “Freewill”, I’m going to skip ahead to the second and third upper echelons of Rush greatness, starting with “The Trees”.
“The Trees” was one of only two normal-length songs on Hemispheres. But regardless, it still had strands of prog rock throughout. The instrumental interludes and chord progressions were eclectic — and the lyrics are some of Neil Peart’s best, a story about trouble in the forest among the maples and oaks. Musically, The Trees covers a lot of ground in under five minutes, starting with a classical guitar introduction, shifting into hard rock Rush and then finishing off with a foreshadowing of the bass and guitar stylings that would later appear on Permanent Waves and, most noticeably, on Moving Pictures. Epic is an understatement.
“There is trouble in the Forest. And the creatures all have fled as the Maples scream ‘Oppression!’ And the Oaks, just shake their heads.”