There’s no rhythm guitar under the guitar solo or anything like that.” Plus, we always felt that we had to replicate each song as faithfully as possible when we played it live, so Tom Sawyer was written in that way. “There was a good integration between the three of us and the keyboards. “On Tom Sawyer, the synthesiser is such a key part of that song,” says Lifeson of the recording. It was really beautiful, but it was minus 40 out there! I’m serious!” The promotional video for Tom Sawyer, shot at Le Studio, begins with a view of this snowbound landscape and ends with a pan out across the frozen lake. If we were brave enough, we walked through the woods.

“We were living in a house beside a lake, and the studio was on the other end of the lake. “It was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life, that’s for sure,” Lifeson laughs. But by the time they began recording the album at Le Studio in Morin Heights, Quebec – the mountain retreat where the band had cut Permanent Waves – a mean Canadian winter had set in. It was high summer when Rush wrote the songs for Moving Pictures. It genuinely felt like a whole other song.” There was a lot of fiddling and I think it created a negative association towards Tom Sawyer, but not when it was finished. It was just weird, because I use the Rick on pretty much every other song on the record, but it wasn’t working on Tom Sawyer whatever we tried. “Yeah, I just couldn’t get the bass sound to work on that song. That was pretty much heresy to a lot of Rush fans. It was like, ‘Okay, this works.’ But up until that point, there was a lot of doubt about that song.”Īnd it was Tom Sawyer where Geddy first laid down his infamous Rickenbacker bass and picked up the Fender Jazz. Then when we heard it back in full, it was like, ‘Holy fuck!’ when those bass pedals came in. But even then, I remember having doubts about that song. We’d do a take and everybody was holding onto their section of the console. “But when we finished and were even mixing the song, and we’d had problems with the computer that was running the mix, so we all had our hands on different parts of the console operating it manually because we didn’t trust the fucking thing. Then it gave it that kind of tubular sound. All of a sudden, Paul Northfield kind of jumped into action and came up with this idea of mic-ing the stereo speakers and doing solo in a stereo spread. I remember when we came to do the solo, and we’re having a lot of trouble getting a sound that happy with. I had real doubt about whether the song was working at all. “We had more trouble with that song than almost any other song.

“I mean, when we were working on Tom Sawyer, actually for the longest time, it was the worst song on the record,” Lee told Prog's Philip Wilding. We would typically just go in and jam and develop songs that way.”īut Tom Sawyer didn't come easily and it almost never made the album. Half the barn was a garage and half was a small rehearsal space. We were rehearsing in a little farm outside of Toronto. That was certainly the case with Tom Sawyer. “A lot of the material for that record was written off the floor. “ Moving Pictures was different for us in that it was more of a jam sort of thing,” Lifeson explains. “It wasn’t a typical kind of structure for us at the time.” Likewise, the music was written in an unorthodox fashion – for Rush, at least. “Structurally, the way the song develops is very interesting, going from that first verse into a bridge into a chorus and into the solo and then repeating,” says Lifeson. The music for Tom Sawyer was also a departure for Rush. As he put it, “Reconciling the boy and man in myself.” Says Lifeson: “Neil took that idea and massaged it, took out some of Pye’s lines and added his thing to it.” Peart chose the simpler title of Tom Sawyer and completed the lyrics with an element of autobiography. What Dubois created in Louie The Warrior was, in Peart’s words, “a portrait of a modern-day rebel”. From 2112 through to Freewill on Permanent Waves, individuality was a recurring subject in Peart’s lyrics. Peart in particular identified with the book’s central themes of rebellion and independence.

The poem was based on Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, which all three members of Rush had studied in school.

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