On May 1, 2007, Rush released their 18th studio album, Snakes & Arrows. This was the band’s second record of original material after their comeback in 2002 with Vapor Trails. The band did put out Feedback in 2004, but that was a collection of cover songs timed for their R30 Tour.
I bought Snakes & Arrows as soon as it was available. I was blogging at this site back then and wrote a less-than-flattering reaction to the songs. After re-reading that post, it’s abundantly clear out of the gate I had trouble connecting with the record. I was already familiar with “Far Cry” because it was released as a single two months before the album, and grew to like what I heard over time. And over time, it’s become a song I truly think is up there as one of their best songs between 2002-2012.
Yes, 13 years ago I clearly felt disconnected from this album. I worried that I was — to quote Air Supply — all out of love for Snakes & Arrows even before I had a chance to fall in love with it. Well, time can change opinions. What was once new and unfamiliar is now well-trodden ground. And so it goes with Snakes & Arrows. As I wrote earlier, “Far Cry” is now up there in my personal ranking system as one of Rush’s best songs in the last 10 years of their career. Alas, time has not altered my opinion of four songs that follow it on the record. The lyrics, however, are another thing! Take “Armor and Sword.” Musically, it’s a bit plodding in tempo. Lyrically, however, it’s some powerful stuff. The songs often critique religion as a thing that can be a comfort and a source of oppression. This is quite clear when Neil Peart lays his cards on the table with the opening verse:
The snakes and arrows a child is heir to
Are enough to leave a thousand cuts
We build our defenses, a place of safety
And leave the darker places unexplored
I wasn’t very fond of this song when I first heard it, and truth be told, I’m still not very fond of it. But reading about the lyrics in the Snakes & Arrows tour book, I found it fascinating how Peart found inspiration for some of the lines and themes through Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” and Richard Dawkin’s 2006 book The God Delusion. Re-reading the lyrics divorced from the music, they become more powerful in what Peart is conveying. Ever the atheist, Peart was reinforcing why he does not believe in gods or a God. He certainly has no doubts that religion — a belief system that offers individuals a way to make sense of the world — can be a great source of comfort. However, he makes sure to note that it’s also a source of violence — especially when belief systems are challenged by others.
“Workin’ Them Angels” is another in a series “it left me cold” songs. I don’t quite know what it is about this song that feels uninspired. Lyrically, however, I like what Peart does to capture moments in time where the narrator (presumably Peart) lived his life “close to the edge.” My favorite lines in the song are those where he’s reflecting on certain milestones that remind him of the chances he took to pursue experiences in the world that had varying degrees of risk. To wit, Memory humming at the heart of a factory town is clearly an allusion to where he grew up (Hamilton, Ontario). Memory strumming at the heart of a moving picture can feel like he’s referencing Rush’s most successful record, but I think looking at the lines that precede it, he lists the Range of Light (which is a trail from Yosemite National Park through part of the Sierra Nevada range) and the wounded city (most likely Toronto after the SARS pandemic shut the city down). Wounded and “moving picture” conjures up the crying old lady on the cover of Rush’s Moving Pictures album who was clearly emotionally moved by the men literally moving pictures up a few stairs and into a building (the pun gets better when another photo reveals the image is part of a film set where they are making a motion or moving picture.) For Peart, it was probably quite moving to see close to 500-thousand people who came out to the Toronto Rocks concert in 2003 to benefit the city hit hard by the SARS epidemic. Rush was on the bill with AC/DC and The Rolling Stones, and it took Peart a week of rehearsing before he could even start rehearsing with the band prior to the performance. He had worked himself up in such a state of pain, fatigue, and show anxiety with rehearsals that when his wife Carrie flew into Toronto from L.A., she took one look at her worn-out husband at the airport and asked, “What’s the matter with you?”
“The Larger Bowl” has in parentheses (“a pantoum”). This song, to me is more of a lyrical experiment with the structure of the pantoum poetic form than a song that sounds inspired. Again, much like previous tracks (“Far Cry” excepted), the music that Lee and Lifeson created — and the way Lee sings the lyrics — feels somewhat sterile and preachy at the same time. It can’t be an easy thing to adapt poetry to song, but the way the band’s partnership was structured lent itself to that exact process. Peart was not a singer-songwriter who combined music and lyrics into a demo for the band to learn or work off of. Rather, the band worked more like an assembly line. Peart submitted lyrics, Lee and Lifeson did long jam sessions, and when they thought a piece of music would fit some lyrics, they would continue to fine-tune the song by revising or cutting lyrics to fit them into the song structure. Often with Rush, this method of creating songs worked quite well. However, with “The Larger Bowl,” the final assembly line product wasn’t as impressive as it may have seemed during the process of fitting pieces together.
“Spindrift” is clearly a quarrel between lovers. The stormy and dark quality of the music does match the lyrical content. There’s a heaviness to the song with layers upon sonic layers that convey what’s lost in the storm of a fight. That sense of loss is made clear when the narrator makes it clear that it’s not a fight that’s desired, rather it’s understanding:
What am I supposed to do?
Where are the words that will make you see
What I believe is true?
Again, Peart is highlighting one of the album’s themes: the tension between belief and the world as it exists. For what is belief if not something an individual is confident is extant — even when presented evidence to the contrary. Religion is rooted in belief, but so are human-to-human relationships. And when intimate relationships start crashing apart, what each person believes about the other can spray out in words that form a truth, but not necessarily The Truth.
“The Main Monkey Business” is a so-so instrumental. Rush has great instrumental moments like “YYZ” or “La Villa Strangiato,” and then there are good to so-so efforts. What makes “The Main Monkey Business” so-so to me is that the music sounds like it was composed to be a full song — but maybe nothing Peart wrote fit its structure. However, the jam Lee and Lifeson created was so good that they didn’t want to leave it off the record.
“The Way The Wind Blows” is one of my favorite songs on Snakes & Arrows. Thematically, lyrically, musically, and the way Geddy sings the tune…what more can I say but the entire composition is one of Rush’s finest late-career songs. Peart is taking on the extremes of belief as it manifests itself in pre- Enlightenment religious and political beliefs that clashed during the George W. Bush-era:
Now it’s come to this
Hollow speeches of mass deception
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Like crusaders in unholy alliance
This is probably Rush’s most political song in their catalog, but because it’s Rush, they keep things lyrically vague instead of directly referencing historical examples or current affairs. There are allusions to the post-9-11 period when The West (writ large) and the Middle East (also, writ large) were going through conservative and radical gyrations to “get back” to a heaven of their own social construct. But as far as specifics go, well…they leave it up to the listener to fill in the blanks.
Alex’s instrumental “Hope” isn’t entirely an optimistic composition, rather its minor chords suggest a musical language that acknowledges despair in the world, but not so much that it’s impossible to overcome. Lifeson’s acoustic composition acts as a bridge to the rest of the album. And it’s in that last half of the record where Peart’s lyrics tackle the lack of faith or belief in the song “Faithless.” It can be seen as a screed against religion, but really “Faithless” is about finding a sense of admiration for the world without the trappings of belief. It’s clearly an atheist’s point of view, but one that’s rooted in a more secular belief in love and hope. One can hope to overcome nihilism, and one can know love between one another, but in the culture that Peart was writing, those things seemed like they were few and far between.
“Bravest Face” picks up on the big theme explored on the album Counterparts — and that is duality. We see this play out lyrically when the narrator starts the verses with I like that song/world/show/story and then contrasts it with the other side of sunny optimism or simple justice. Musically, I still agree with my 2007 self when I wrote that I haven’t heard Alex Lifeson play this loose and bluesy on a Rush record. It shows that the kind of jams he and Lee were recording netted them some really good musical ideas to fit into the songs. Alas, “Good News First” feels a little phoned in both lyrically and musically. I don’t have much to say about this song because it’s not really all that interesting to me, so why prolong writing about it.
“Malignant Narcissism” is a jam that gives the guys a good workout. It’s not an instrumental that’s busy and complex, rather it’s a groove jam that allows the band to enjoy the vibe without having to make it complicated as the music progresses. Based on a surreptitious recording that producer Nick Raskulinecz made of Geddy Lee messing around on his new fretless bass between vocal takes, the groove was too good to Raskulinecz to let pass without capturing it. Peart was still at the studio and he liked what he heard and jumped behind a smaller practice kit to play along with Lee. Alex Lifeson came back to the studio a few days later and was presented with a “Hey, look what we did” recording for him to add to — which he did. Pretty good for a last-minute jam, and the final product certainly met Rush’s standard enough to be included on the record.
“We Hold On” is a very strong album closer. The lyrics are effective in capturing the little and big frustrations that befall us all in life. It could be the petty sniping in a relationship that makes us tempted to cut and run. It could be the soul-crush or mind-numbing nature of a job where a mundane existence is measured out in coffee breaks. The motivation to just ditch it all and drive away into the setting sun is tempting, but Peart leaves the door open that no matter how much of a bad situation a person is in, there’s a chance that we might not be so wrong so, as the title says, we hold on. I do like this song quite a lot. It has effective tempo changes, creative guitar work from Lifeson — and Lee sings with the right amount of emotion to convey the message of the song without sounding overbearing. The music, like “Malignant Narcissism,” is very much a groove jam, but what elevates it is the bridge Lifeson composed that has a kind of call and response — where the “call” is roughly the same, but each “response” gets more interesting until it breaks into a kind of Russian-inspired gallop. It’s those touches that took a good song and made it really good.
While Snakes & Arrows is not one of my favorite Rush albums, I think it was made at a time when the band was trying to find its footing after the long process that went into making Vapor Trails. The themes expressed on the album are good, and some of the songs are really wonderful, but the complete package — as it were — tends to miss the mark rather than hitting it. Perhaps the band sensed that this effort wasn’t very strong, so after the tour they essentially mothballed most of the nine songs they featured from the album, leaving only “Far Cry” as the one they played on successive tours — until the final curtain came down on the R40 Tour in 2015. Still, Snakes & Arrows is a kind of “bridge album” to their swansong — and one of the strongest albums the band made in decades — Clockwork Angels.
