Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson recently admitted that he now wants to play more shows with the band, despite having initial concerns about returning to the stage. Lifeson and bandmate Geddy Lee discussed their experiences touring without their late drummer Neil Peart, alongside his replacement Anika Nilles, during an appearance on Q with Tom Power.
During the interview, the musicians were asked about how it feels to be back on the road without Peart and how the experience has been for them.
“It feels fantastic to be honest,” Lifeson said. “I think all the fears that I had starting out whether physically I would be up to it, whether my hands would work as well as I expected because like Getty was saying, you know, you want to go beyond what the previous gig was. Once we started playing and I felt confident and good about my physical condition, I really fell in love with it.”
Lifeson went on to express his appreciation for their new touring drummer, Anika Nilles, and how his perspective on the tour has shifted.
“I love the songs,” Lifeson continued. “I love playing with Anika. She is a brilliant musician and she’s a wonderful person. She has a great sense of humor. We’ve become really quite close in the two years we’ve been working with her because it has been a while. I’m really really excited and I have to admit that I’m maybe perhaps I wasn’t quite so excited when it was just a concept.”
He also addressed his initial health concerns and how overcoming them changed his outlook on performing.
“I just had reservations about it, mostly health related reservations, but I got my health in order relatively,” Lifeson added. “And the key was to be able to play the way I felt I needed to play. So, I’ve just fallen totally in love with it. And now I’m the guy who wants to do more gigs.”
Geddy Lee also shared his thoughts on Lifeson’s change of heart and the emotional weight of performing without Peart.
“I know. It’s just unbelievable to hear him say that,” Lee said. “But, you know, it wasn’t a simple journey to get back on stage, and I know we’re not really here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about Neil, but Neil’s presence is always there. I mean, it really is in so many ways.”
Lee explained how they honor Peart’s memory during their performances and the pressure they felt to deliver a worthy tribute.
“I mean, we pay tribute to him during the show, of course, and I try to tell stories about him and try to give people a look behind the songs as to how they came together and what we feel about each other and him,” Lee continued. “But you know, it was a very unlikely thing that we would be back to play together. And of course, at the age that we are, which I will not say out loud, there’s a lot of fear.”
He elaborated on the specific fears they faced regarding their performance standards and honoring their late bandmate.
“And what Alex is talking about is that it’s the fear,” Lee added. “The fear that you’re not going to be as good as you were. The fear that you’re going to let people down. And that is not how you honor your fallen comrade by letting people down. So there was a lot of pressure on our shoulders to be as good if not better than we have ever been and put a show together that would do his tribute justice. So that’s what Al’s talking about. You had those terrified moments.”
Lee concluded by sharing his personal philosophy on keeping Peart’s memory alive.
“Well, when you lose somebody, you know, somebody was asking me the other day about, ‘Do I believe in the afterlife?'” Lee said. “And I said, ‘Well, the afterlife is for people that are still alive.’ You create the afterlife by making that person present, talking about them, remembering them, telling stories about them. That’s how you keep them alive. That is, for me, that’s the afterlife.”
The interview offers a rare look at the emotions behind Rush’s return to the stage, a comeback that once seemed impossible after the death of the band’s longtime drummer. The context surrounding the reunion helps explain why both musicians speak about the tour in such personal terms.
Neil Peart was Rush’s drummer and lyricist for 45 years, joining the band in 1974 and retiring in 2015 before his death. Peart died of brain cancer on January 7, 2020, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 67, a loss that made the band’s return to touring unthinkable for years. Rush’s official biography notes that he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, only a year after his retirement.
Anika Nilles, the drummer now carrying Peart’s live role, is a German percussionist and composer who built her reputation through jazz, fusion and progressive rock work. Nilles is a German jazz, fusion and prog drummer and composer who first gained attention through YouTube performances in the 2010s before joining the band for the reunion run.
The reunion itself was announced five years after Peart’s death. Rush co-founders Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson revealed a 12-date, seven-city tour scheduled for summer 2026, kicking off in June with stops that included Mexico City, Fort Worth, Chicago, New York and Toronto.
The run, billed as the Fifty Something tour, opened at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum on June 8, 2026. The show marked the band’s first full-length concert in nearly 11 years and their first headlining performance since Peart’s death, as well as their first full show with Nilles behind the kit.
Reviews of that opening night framed the concert as both a tribute and a passing of the torch. The show “felt like a tribute to Neil Peart, the group’s revered scholar of a drummer who died of brain cancer in 2020, a loss that made such an evening unthinkable.” The same review described the night as “a coronation of sorts” for Nilles.
That history gives added weight to Lifeson’s admission that he now wants to play more shows. What began as a carefully planned comeback has, by his own account, become something he has grown to love.
