Music 2025

 

 

This is a new development.

 

So far 2025 has not struck me in any particular literary way. Nothing has really jumped out at me, nor have any themes leapt up and seized me by the lapels demanding attention. No new subjects have overrun my mental Maginot line. No paradigm shifts or reading revolutions. No nostalgia bait hooking me like a spring-loaded cat as I shuffle about candle in hand down the dark, damp, cobwebby corridors of memory. Nothing.

 

Except …

 

Music.

 

2025 has been the year of music for me, so far, these past ten weeks.

 

It all started at Christmas. The Mrs had bought me Geddy Lee’s autobiography, My Effin’ Life. Who is Geddy Lee? Only one of the greatest bassists ever, also known as the vocalist for the band Rush. Rush was one of the first bands I listened to at that very vulnerable age, right after the Golden Age of Science Fiction (when a lad turns eleven and before he turns thirteen). To this day I still remember the first song of theirs I heard – “Tom Sawyer,” to no surprise (it was 1981 and the song had only been out a year). However, I had heard it on my brother’s Walkman, and the way the sounds entered my brain, panning between ears, the new sounds of distorted guitars, keyboards, and an army of drums, ignited a passionate curiosity that still lasts to this day.

 

I put My Effin’ Life into immediate rotation and wrote of it here a few weeks’ back.

 

As I have written about many, many times in the Hopper, Rush was one of my top three bands, especially when I was stumbling out into forming bands, writing songs, playing live, and recording, at home, in a friend’s garage, or in the studio. I did this off and on from about 1986-96, to no great success but plenty of fun. My long-time bass player and drummer, both good pals, were also Rush fans. And when my singer and lead guitarist were not present, we’d run through a good dozen Rush songs to warm up. It was a blast.

 

But I was only exposed to 70s Rush. Their first eponymous album debuted in 1974, and the last album I really listened to, Signals, came out in 1981. For most of the 80s they adopted an 80s sound, which didn’t interest me. In the 90s they adopted a 90s sound, again which didn’t interest me because by that time I was listening to first grunge and then, around 1998, I switched completely to classical music for the following five years.

 

I tell all this to let you know that I made it a little side quest to listen to Rush’s 19 studio albums in chronological order. (The band technically ended in 2015 when drummer Neil Peart retired from touring; Peart later died in 2020.) So I basically exposed myself to ten albums of new music, about nine hours of 90 new songs. Nice!

 

Now, I’m still not a fan of 80s Rush, but, man, did I enjoy most of 90s (and 2000s) Rush. With some help from Patch I made two playlists for my phone – “Rush 80s” and “Rush Minus 5”. I have been listening to this almost exclusively during my walks and a little bit each day as I do my accounting chores for work.

 

“Rush 80s” is 17 songs, 1 hour 29 minutes, of the best to my liking of those four 80s albums.

 

“Rush Minus 5” is a playlist of every song on the last five albums from the band:

   Counterparts (1993)

   Test for Echo (1996)

   Vapor Trails (2002)

   Snakes & Arrows (2007)

   Clockwork Angels (2012)

Each of these five albums is loaded with A and B+ songs. Each usually has a pair of A+ songs. Only one song of all these five albums was not added. This playlist has 59 songs for 4 hours and 59 minutes of music. It is great to play through my Bluetooth speaker while lifting.

 

Then, last month, the Mrs and I went to see the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin in the theaters. Now, I know it’s essentially a hagiography, but, man, what an outstanding hagiography. I had goosebumps and a lump in my throat listening and watching for those two hours. In anticipation, I had bought a biography of the band, When Giants Walked the Earth, and had read that over the ten days following. This is the first time I did an in-depth deep dive into one of my favorite all-time bands next to Rush. It’s the first written material I’d read on the band and Jimmy Page since reading The Hammer of the Gods forty years ago. Yeah, the long passages of drug excess, groupies, and the occult grew tiresome, but the backstories of the members and the songs and the recording techniques and technical aspects of the tours fascinated me this time around.

 

And on a side note, all this Rush and Led Zeppelin, part-nostalgic and part-new, has not crowded out my quarter-decade interest in classical music. In addition to my Beethoven symphony score I wrote about last month, I also picked up a record of Copland’s greatest works and another of Bach’s organ music, particularly the Toccata and Fugue in Dm.

 

So 2025 is really a musical year for me, something I haven’t truly experienced since 1998 or 1999.

 

Happy listening!
 

N.B. I also pulled my electric guitar out of storage and have been playing and practicing for an hour each Sunday over the past five weeks …