(Credits: Far Out / ceedub13)
Thu 16 October 2025 19:02, UK
The biggest testing ground for any potential Rush fan is seeing how they react to Geddy Lee when they first hear him.
As much as the band were known for melting minds whenever they tore through one of their epics, Lee’s voice does tend to sound somewhere between Robert Plant’s massive howl, the heights of a trained opera singer, or an old lady screaming in a few spots. Even though there have been countless unflattering critiques of Lee’s voice, there are always ways for him to use his voice in an unconventional way.
Then again, him singing high back in the day almost seemed like a necessity. If you think about the way that they structure tunes, some of their best riffs take up the entire midrange of the mix, so having Lee floating on top of everything was one of the only ways that they could have lyrics to one of their songs without them being swallowed up by Alex Lifeson’s guitars and Neil Peart’s drums.
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t find a few clever ways around working on their tunes. ‘The Twilight Zone’ is one of the more mellow tunes that they ever released from around their prime, but even with his screeching voice in the verses, the choruses are where everything gets a lot moodier with his whisper vocal in the middle of the tune. When any singer has been singing like that for years, though, there’s bound to be a point where their voice needs to go somewhere else.
It would have been impossible for Lee to sing like that and hit all those notes up into 40s, let alone 70s, and their 1980s period was the perfect middle ground for most fans. There was the odd high note on records like ‘Limelight’, but hearing him stick to his middle range did give them a sense of swagger that no one would have expected out of a band that was most known for being listened to by nerds.
Still, there were bound to be a few endurance notes that he had to go through every single night. ‘The Temples of Syrinx’ is a workout for anyone’s larynx on a good day, but even if Lee moved away from that style of singing, he knew that ‘Freewill’ is where he reaches his absolute limit as far as high notes are concerned.
But even if other tunes aren’t nearly as high as this, Lee admitted that it was much easier for him to reach that musical ceiling if he builds up to it, saying, “Take a song like ‘Freewill’, where the end part is about as high as I can possibly sing. For some reason, that part is not very difficult for me. ‘Temples of Syrinx’, just wear out my voice by stressing my vocal chords, while songs like ‘Freewill’, that require I sing in a high range, are very balanced songs where I can hit those notes with relative ease.”
It’s bad enough to reach to the top of his range like that, but the idea of him flying across the bass while singing along is one of the most gruelling tasks any musician has put themselves through. It has to be muscle memory to some degree, but Lee’s ability to fly up and down the neck without even looking at the neck is a feat that should give Peart and run for his money behind the drum kit.
And for anyone even mildly interested in taking on a Rush song for their cover band, just remember that a tune like ‘Freewill’ might be one of the most manageable tunes in their catalogue. If this is already one of the hardest tunes for anyone to take on, imagine trying to take a stab like ‘Xanadu’ or ‘La Villa Strangiato’.
Related Topics
