Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson recently discussed how playing with new drummer Anika Nilles reminded them of who they are as a band, sharing their insights in an interview with Rolling Stone.
The musicians explained how working with Nilles forced them to re-learn their own music and better understand Neil Peart’s unique drumming style. When asked what they learned about Rush’s drum parts that they hadn’t fully realized until they had to communicate them to someone new, Lee and Lifeson shared their experiences.
“We were learning what Anika was learning,” Geddy Lee said. “We were realizing how different Neil’s feel is from other styles of play. So through Anika’s experiences, we were understanding Neil’s composition better and better.”
Lee went on to explain that Nilles would sometimes ask him about the specific time signatures of certain musical passages, which he did not always know offhand.
“And sometimes Anika would write me and say, ‘What time is this part in?’ And I would go, ‘F*ck, I don’t know!'” Lee continued. “So I would go back and listen to it, and I would count it out. And I realized that we wrote parts as musical passages, and we would do a weird musical passage in an odd time signature, but we wouldn’t need to count what that time signature was, ’cause we would just glue a bunch of phrases together and we knew it intrinsically. We knew it inherently.”
Lee added that explaining these intuitive parts to Nilles required him to go back and analyze the songs more closely.
“And whenever we rehearsed it, we just rehearsed the part,” Lee said. “So having to explain that to Anika was really hard for me, and I had to go back and say, ‘Well, wait a second. Let me listen.’ And then I would say, ‘Well, I think there’s a bar of eight or a bar of six.’ She’d go, ‘Well, I think it’s all in seven,’ or it was the other way around I think. So it was a re-education for me.”
Alex Lifeson also reflected on how the experience highlighted Peart’s subtle playing techniques.
“And it was more apparent how Neil, by spending so much time, he would just shift his weight so subtly on the front or the back, just leaning this way or just leaning this way,” Lifeson said. “That’s all in between the big stuff. And it becomes really the glue, the basic glue that keeps everything all together. And that became much more apparent.”
The conversation arrives as Rush moves through a reunion that few fans expected to see. The band announced its “Fifty Something” reunion tour in early October 2025, marking the first time in roughly a decade that Lee and Lifeson would tour together again. According to Variety, the initial run was billed as a short North American trek that began on June 7, 2026, in Los Angeles, with 12 arena shows across seven cities.
Demand quickly reshaped those plans. The award-winning German composer and producer Anika Nilles was confirmed as the drummer filling in for Peart, and additional dates were added as shows sold out. The tour has since expanded into a much larger outing, with Rush adding 17 new cities after the original seven sold out multiple nights.
Nilles’ arrival carries its own history. She is a German drummer, composer and producer who previously performed as Jeff Beck’s drummer and released four solo albums. Coverage of the reunion noted that stepping into Peart’s seat came after a five-day audition with Lee and Lifeson.
The weight of that seat is difficult to overstate. Peart, Rush’s drummer and lyricist, died on January 7, 2020, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 67. His drumming was both intricate and powerful, built around complex time signatures that enhanced the band’s dynamic rather than distracting from it.
His command of unusual meters became a signature of the band’s catalog. Peart was a master at making odd time signatures feel right at home on the FM dial, and his long, elaborate solos became a defining part of Rush’s live shows. Songs such as “Tom Sawyer,” “YYZ” and “Jacob’s Ladder” remain the clearest examples of that rhythmic complexity.
Lee has summed up the challenge of revisiting that material in a single line. “Sometimes I didn’t even know the time signature of a passage until she asked me,” he told. The remark captures the paradox at the center of Rush’s reunion: the parts were so deeply internalized that the men who wrote them never needed to count them, yet explaining them to a new drummer meant learning them all over again.
