Recently in Random News Category

There's a decent recent interview with Alex Lifeson over at Crawdaddy! today.

Not much new sadly. Here are some highlights.

On picking new songs to play:

We wanted to play the whole record live, but we had to settle for nine songs, otherwise we'd be playing for four hours and that's a little too much for us and, I think, for our audience. We had to make a decision about some of the songs we wanted to do. We all really wanted to do "Faithless", and we talked about actually doing it on the last half of the tour. We prepped it and we ran through it a couple of times, but in the end we just decided to kind of stick with what we had and just change up some of the older stuff.

On Rush being an influential group:

I think that younger bands look at us as perhaps a model that, you know what, you can do it your way. You can play the music that you want to play. You can find your audience, you can grow and not get stuck in all the things that, you know, people used to get stuck in. Now, granted, things have changed so much in the last five to 10 years in the industry, and things don't happen the way they used to happen...

Spotted the news at rushisaband.com this morning.

There's a greatest hits package coming out soon called Rush: 1989-2009. Word is that there's be unreleased live tracks from that era. Word also is that they're looking to sign with Rounder Records.

Returning to television after a 33-year gap, Rush will play Tom Sawyer on The Colbert Report tonight at 11:30 pm EST. Set those VCRs/TIVOs.

It's among the largest single donations the museum has had, according to director of marketing Bob Kendrick. It also represents some history the museum didn't previously have. "Some of these guys have been dead for some time, and we could not get these (signatures) before no matter what their significance was in the Negro Leagues," he said.

The members of Canadian rock band Rush have donated $100,000 from the sale of tickets to last weekend's Winnipeg concert to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The three band mates -- Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart -- also announced today they will be selling museum T-shirts at all of the remaining Canadian stops on their Snakes and Arrows Live concert tour, and donating all of the proceeds from those sales to the museum's $105-million private sector fund-raising campaign. "My band mates and I are proud to be associated with the creation of a Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg," Lee said in a written statement.

Seen at rushisaband.com the other day. Official obituary is here at the National Post.

There's a new interview with Alex over at Billboard.com. He talks about the live album/dvd and the upcoming tour.

Lots of tidbits:

DVD in later summer/early fall. Shot in HD.

"We thought we should maybe revisit some older songs we're not playing currently or haven't been in the last little while. So we changed out a few songs in the set. We're gonna keep it loose and maybe kind of bounce back and forth."

New album news?

"I'm guessing that we're probably going to take a little bit of the break at the end of this tour," says Lifeson, who's been updating his Web site with a number of new features he hopes to roll out soon. "I don't see us really doing much in the way of any new material probably until the spring of next year, and then we'll see where we go."

A 12-year -old Rush fan and guitarist named Zack Tabori comes up to the Hughes & Kettner booth at the NAMM show last month and asks to play the Alex Lifeson Signature TriAmp. They let him go ahead and do so and are impressed by his playing and offer to take his conact info so that Big Al can hook him up with some swag and tickets. Alex decided to give the kid one of his amps as well.

You can see a video of the whole story here. Well worth watching, the kid is blown away.