Aside from giving bass guitar lessons to Primus's Les Claypool and collaborating on a secret project with Barenaked Ladies' Ed Robertson, Rush bassist Geddy Lee, it turns out, has been working on a memoir lately.
Set for release next autumn via HarperCollins, the project began as a way for Lee to channel the grief he felt after the death of his Rush bandmate, Neil Peart, from brain cancer last January.
“My friend and collaborator on the Big Beautiful Book Of Bass, Daniel Richler, saw how I was struggling in the aftermath of Neil’s passing, and tried coaxing me out of my blues with some funny tales from his youth, daring me to share my own in return,” Lee wrote on Instagram earlier this week. “So I did – reluctantly at first, but then remembering, oh yeah, I like wrestling with words. And soon my baby-step stories were becoming grownup chapters.
"Being the nuclear obsessive that I am, I'd write and re-write them, reassessing perspectives in the narrative not just by scouring my memory banks but my diaries and piles of photo albums too – In a voice that sounded, well, just like me, a presentable, epic-length account of my life on and off the stage was taking shape: my childhood, my family, the story of my parents' survival, my travels and all sorts of nonsense I've spent too much time obsessing over.”
In addition to the memoir and his project with Ed Robertson, there also exists the ongoing possibility of a future collaboration featuring Lee and his other Rush comrade, electric guitar legend Alex Lifeson.
"We’re both eager to get back together and kind of get back into that thing that we’ve done since we were 14 years old that we love to do," Lifeson told Make Weird Music in February. "And we work really, really well together, so we’ll see what happens with that.”
More recently, Lifeson clarified that, should he create and release any new music with Lee, it would not be under the Rush name.
“Rush ended in 2015," Lifeson told Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM in July. "There’s no way Rush will ever exist again because Neil’s not here to be a part of it.”
