“I can get back home,” Geddy Lee yelped early in Rush‘s first show in 11 years, amidst an apocalyptic flurry of drum fills from new touring member Anika Nilles on 2007’s “Far Cry.” As the rest of Rush’s Fifty Something Tour kickoff Sunday at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum demonstrated, that particular Neil Peart lyric — along with many others — was prophetic. After traversing a long, dark, grief-laden path to get there, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and their fans somehow made it all the way back to a spectacular Rush concert, in an arena they’d played 20 times before.
On that same stage nearly 11 years ago, Lee, Lifeson, and Peart performed what turned out to be their final show together, at the end of their R40 tour. “I do hope we meet again sometime,” Lee told the crowd then, after Peart uncharacteristically stepped to the front of the stage with his bandmates for a final bow. Not long after, Peart was diagnosed with glioblastoma, and he died on Jan. 7, 2020, leaving behind his wife, Carrie Nuttall, and daughter, Olivia. For a while after his passing, Lee and Lifeson weren’t even interested in picking up their instruments.
Sunday’s show was filled with overt, oft-tear-inducing tributes to Peart, but the most important salute to him lasted the entire concert, via the performance and courage of a woman he never got to meet. At 43, Nilles is three decades younger than Lifeson and Lee, with a jazz-fusion background and a gig with Jeff Beck on her resumé. On Sunday night, she took on an impossible, no-doubt terrifying assignment — standing in for one of the greatest drummers of all time, in front of one of the most persnickety fanbases of all time — with a mix of precision and snare-snapping brutality that felt more reminiscent of Peart’s All the World’s a Stage era than his later, jazz-tempered approach.
She didn’t always choose to replicate Peart’s parts to a microscopic level, subtly reinventing “Subdivisions” with her own feel, for instance, but evoked his essence throughout. And for the most indelible percussive moments in the catalog — the intro to show opener “Xanadu,” the climactic fills in “Tom Sawyer,” every tricky little ultra-syncopated bit of “La Villa Strangiato” and “YYZ” — she simply nailed everything, down to the last 32nd note. At times, the musical likeness was so uncanny that it evoked Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, the spirit of the departed animating her limbs. If Nilles was possessed, however, it was clearly an enjoyable experience: She was downright gleeful by the end of “Tom Sawyer,” and even seemed to enjoy the challenges of three parts of “2112.”
It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most emotional Rush concerts ever. One of the many gifts that Peart left behind was a catalog sturdy enough to hold the weight of grief. For all of Rush’s onstage humor — present Sunday night with pre-filmed sketches including South Park bits and new appearances by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel as their Rush-loving I Love You, Man characters — their songs are filled with Peart’s attempts to grapple with life’s biggest questions. One of those tracks, “Bravado,” was the night’s first Peart tribute, prefaced with interview audio from the drummer. “If the dream is won, though everything is lost,” Lee sang, as footage of the drummer drove an arena full of grown men (and more women than many prior Rush tours) to tears. “We will pay the price/ But we will not count the cost.” At points, Lee sounded like he was close to tears himself. Lifeson’s closing guitar solo, looping through arpeggios, managed to take in all of that emotion and quadruple it.
In keeping with the show’s defiance of mortality, Lee and Lifeson seemed to have almost aged in reverse since 2015, with Lifeson notably trimmer and musically nimble, and Lee pummeling his bass while skipping around the stage faster than any 71-year-old should be able to manage. They made a point of starting out with “Xanadu,” demonstrating that their spines could still handle double-neck instruments and their fingers can still handle 1977 prog riffs.
“When we started thinking about this tour, we thought, well, we can’t play so many songs like we used to,” Lee said. “We’re no spring chickens. But guess what? We’re gonna play a lot of songs.” With that, they kicked into “Freewill,” unplayed since 2011, with Lee daring to take on its stratospheric final verse, and Lifeson splaying the song open with a cosmic-shred take on its solo. Lee’s recent vocal coaching hasn’t taken him all the way back to the glorious peaks of his Seventies screeching, but it’s undeniably left his voice stronger than it was 11 years ago, with its top octave once again available to him. Leaving some of the keyboard parts to new touring player Loren Gold (who played with the Who) was clearly liberating for Lee, who still couldn’t resist playing some key synth riffs himself.
When the band played a ferocious “Red Barchetta,” it was hard not to think of Rush itself as the titular car, a hotrodded remnant of a “better, vanished time,” somehow still roaring down the road long after it should be possible. During another song, 1991’s “Dreamline,” Lee sang one of Peart’s best, most accurate lines: “We’re only immortal for a limited time.” But as proven by the rest of the show, and by the life and work of Neil Peart, limits are made to be broken.
Rush Fifty Something Tour Setlist
Set 1
“Xanadu”
“Limelight”
“Far Cry”
“Subdivisions”
“Freewill”
“Bravado”
“Caravan”
“La Villa Strangiato”
“Vital Signs”
“The Spirit of Radio”
Set 2
“2112 Part I: Overture”
“2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx”
“2112 Part VII: Grand Finale”
“Distant Early Warning”
“Red Barchetta”
“Dreamline”
“Natural Science”
“Time Stand Still”
“Red Sector A”
“YYZ”
“The Garden”
“Tom Sawyer”
Encore
“By-Tor & The Snow Dog”
“Working Man”
Courtesy of Martin Garrix
Louis Van Baar*
Courtesy Photo
Courtesy Photo
Liam Payne (left) and Harry Styles of One Direction onstage during the 2013 American Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Nov. 24, 2013
Harry Styles Finds the Right Words on Liam Payne Tribute Song
For the past seven weeks, Harry Styles has reserved two minutes at each of his Madison Square Garden shows to reflect on the last time he gathered this many people in this room. Four years have passed since he performed 15 record-breaking nights at the venue during his Love on Tour. Now, every night at the new Together, Together shows, which span 30 nights at MSG, he acknowledges that “a lot of life happened to me and landed on me in ways that maybe it hadn’t before.”
Styles doesn’t usually go into much more detail; he typically just describes those in-between years as “a great reminder for me of just how wonderful and beautiful, difficult and inspiring, and also how fragile a life can be.” He encourages the audience to look around at each other and celebrate the community they’ve built together. Then he dives into “Sign of the Times.” It happens every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday like clockwork. But when he delivered this speech on Friday, Oct. 16, there was a shift. It didn’t conclude in its usual way.
Instead, Styles turned his attention to the banner commemorating his 15 consecutive nights at the Garden in 2022. “It means a lot to be able to look up there at my name up there from the last tour,” he said. “There are so many people, friends and people that I’ve worked with, that I would’ve never been able to do this without.” Two years ago, he continued, he lost one of those pillars. Friday’s show fell on the same day as the second anniversary of the death of Liam Payne, a loss that time has not made it easier to acknowledge. “I’m sure a lot of you have been through something similar,” Styles said. “I hope you haven’t.”
A frequent assessment of Styles, both among his fans and those who’ve only encountered him at a distance, is that he often talks at length before getting to the point. He recognizes it himself on the Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally song “Coming Up Roses,” where he sings about fumbling his words. But recently, comments about his long-winded way of speaking have started to feel like purposeful misreadings. There are clear and carefully considered thoughts present between his starts and stops. Anyone truly listening will pick up on those threads.
Styles cut himself off a few times during his speech on Friday. He tried to talk for a second about looking after each other, and repeated his point about the banner and the people who’ve supported him. He never mentions Payne by name, instead referring to him as a friend, which somehow became a point of criticism from some fans. The context is clear enough. Still, he seems to know it’s a gamble to expect understanding, especially when the conversation grows more complex and personal.
After about a minute and a half, Styles figured it best to show us what he means rather than tell us. “I’m gonna sing a song I wrote two years ago for my friend,” he said before premiering “Wise Enough.” The sullen tribute to Payne settled the room into a cool near-silence, punctured by quiet gasps and muffled crying. It was beautiful, devastating, and deeply exposing to watch Styles share his grief with 20,000 people in the best, and maybe only, way he knows how.
Earlier this year, Styles told Zane Lowe about the acute dread surrounding the expected performance of his mourning. “Full transparency, even the idea of talking about it, I struggle with that a little bit. There was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with acknowledging how strange it is to have people own part of your grief, in a way,” he said. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. And then suddenly being aware there’s maybe a desire from other people of you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling.”
Artists often describe the act of sharing new music as a change in ownership, something that is no longer their own once it has been handed over to an audience. “Wise Enough” feels protected from this. It would be confounding to see Styles ever record and release it in any official capacity. The song is openhearted in a way that exposes deep scars, anxious in a way that worries and fidgets about time and how it passes, and inconsolable in a way that doesn’t make the futile attempt to fight through anger, regret, or sadness.
“I can tell you what it’s like to bury friends on Wednesday nights/Gather in a garden around the fire,” Styles sings in a particularly cutting verse on the song, which concludes with an honest admission: “I’m not wise enough to call for a conversation/And then back it up, right?/Like you’re in the sky.”
Celebrity doesn’t obscure grief. It doesn’t come with a script for what to say when someone is sorry for your loss, or when they recollect their own version of the person you knew. No one really has the right words for these moments. Over the weekend, fans debated whether “Wise Enough” is actually titled “What Is Enough?” Styles introduced the record so briskly it was hard to decipher. The question of adequacy feels similarly impossible to answer.
Grief is so plain in how universal it is, but so complex in how and when it chooses to present itself. It can be policed only as much as it can be predicted, which is to say barely at all. That Styles let us into his now yearslong search for some semblance of understanding — knowing how his words have been picked apart before for far lesser things — shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Styles never acknowledges that banner at MSG. It’s not for lack of gratitude — he cried when it was unveiled. But the point he has reiterated every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday since the end of August is that the achievement is something that must be shared because he couldn’t have done it alone. He talks about being on stage as if what happens in that room exists far beyond and outside of himself, something that endures even in his absence.
It’s true in a way. There’s muscle memory tied to the music. It’s in the spinning, dizzying way fans dance to “Satellite,” or the way they wildly kick their feet and make the building shake during “Kiwi,” a song he brought back to the set just for New York. It’s just like before, but still so different.
Friday night continued as usual after “Wise Enough.” Styles belted out “Sign of the Times” in the sobering way he always does, then “Aperture” let in a cathartic flood of strobing lights and pulsating beats. The emotional whiplash took physical form as fans consoled one another, holding out their hands to help up friends and strangers who crumbled to the floor at the conclusion of the tribute. Some were crushed by their memories of loving One Direction, and the care they hold in their hearts for Styles. Some were just as wrecked by their own personal losses.
A lot of life and loss can happen in four years, as Styles says each night. For some people who were at MSG on Friday, there are friends present in their memories from the last tour who are missing from the new ones they’re making. The lyric “You dance until you’re tired/No, you don’t, and now you never will/Will you?” surfaces their own devastation completely separate from what inspired Styles to sprawl those words on a page. How do you dance to “Aperture” — the beating heart of this show in its declaration that “we belong together” — after hearing something like that?
You take the hand of the friend or the stranger who pulled you from the ground and use it to lead each other back to the dance floor. When Styles talks about community and stresses the importance of caring for one another each night, he reminds everyone of the fragility of a moment, and urges them to cherish every second they get. To dance wildly and sing loudly and wrap their arms around each other. To hold tight to what’s here right now.
It’s all any of us have, so it has to be enough.