Rush on their new tour, new music, and documentary.

Awesome interview with Geddy. Thanks Mike! From MSNBC:

This summer, Rush will be hitting the U.S. and Canadian concert trail on their “Time Machine Tour,” which will see the trio perform their 1981 classic “Moving Pictures” in its entirety. They'll also be road-testing new material they're working up for their 19th studio effort. Frontman Geddy Lee tells Rolling Stone the fresh tracks are "upbeat, hard rocking songs" with a Rush trademark: "typically absurdist arrangements."

Will you release some new songs to coincide with the tour?
I'd imagine — because we don't have time to do more than two at the moment — we'll probably release one as soon as it's ready, before the tour starts, and then probably release the second one as the tour starts. But our hope was to really get something down on tape, so we could play these songs live and road test them in a way. We're still kind of throwing titles back in forth, but one is called "Caravan."

Why tour in the middle of recording an album?
Everybody was kind of itching to get on the road and try and get in "peak playing form" before we recorded the bulk of the record, just to see what that effect is. In a way, we have this tendency to take a long period of time off, and then we kind of get our chops together and then go record. We thought it's kind of ass-backwards really, because when you finish a long tour, you're in such amazing playing shape that really, that's the time you should go in and start laying down tracks. But of course, you're exhausted by then, so we're trying to figure out if there's another way of attacking it.

[...] How has the forthcoming Rush documentary, Beyond the Lighted Stage, turned out?
It's hard for me to watch myself up on the screen, talking for two hours. It's really kind of funny to look at a lot of the old stuff — they found some amazing, really obscure photographs and movies. It's kind of nice to see other people talking about us in a kind of objective sense. I was pretty amazed that certain people were Rush fans, like Billy Corgan, for example. He was very well-spoken in the film, and seems to really understand where we're coming from. That was quite a surprise for me.