Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have spent recent months revisiting their own catalog through an unexpected lens: teaching Neil Peart’s drum parts to someone who didn’t grow up playing them. In a new conversation, the pair described the process of working with drummer Anika Nilles. They explained that having to communicate music they had always known “intrinsically” forced them to re-examine how those songs were built in the first place. The exchange, reported by Rolling Stone, centers less on nostalgia than on the mechanics of Rush’s writing — odd time signatures, glued-together phrases, and the subtle physical details of Peart’s playing that held everything together.
According to Rolling Stone, the conversation turned on a simple question: what did Lee and Lifeson learn about the drum parts to Rush songs that they hadn’t quite grasped until they had to explain them to someone new?
A Re-Education In Odd Time
Lee’s answer was frank. He described learning alongside Nilles rather than ahead of her. In doing so, he gained a clearer view of how distinctive Peart’s feel was compared to other approaches to the kit. “We were learning what Anika was learning,” Lee explained. “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.”
The friction came when Nilles asked a straightforward question with no straightforward answer. “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 said. Rather than reciting a number, he had to go back and count the passage out himself. What he found was a working method he had never fully articulated. “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.”
That kind of knowledge, built through repetition rather than theory, proved hard to hand off. “And whenever we rehearsed it, we just rehearsed the part. 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.”
Neil Peart’s Subtle Weight Shifts As The “Glue”
Lifeson drew a related conclusion from the same process, focusing on the details of Peart’s physical approach that never showed up on a page. “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,” he 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.”
In Lifeson’s framing, the architecture of a Rush song wasn’t only in its celebrated complexity — the fills, the meter changes, the technical demands that drew attention. It was in the micro-adjustments between those moments. Working with a new drummer made that invisible layer visible.
What The Process Revealed
Taken together, the two accounts describe a band encountering its own catalog as a set of problems to be solved rather than a set of memories to be replayed. Lee’s admission that he sometimes could not name the time signature of his own material is less an oversight than a description of how the music was assembled: by ear, by feel, and by instinct, phrase by phrase, until the result became second nature. Reconstructing that for Nilles required converting instinct back into explanation.
The conversation leaves open questions about how that translation ultimately shaped the performances themselves — whether the songs came out sounding more analytical, or simply more deliberate. Those details, and the broader context surrounding the project, sit beyond what this exchange covers. What the quotes make clear is that the exercise cut both ways. Nilles was learning Rush, and Lee and Lifeson were relearning it too.
For Nilles, the task carried a weight that goes beyond technique. She was handed the drum throne of one of rock’s most analyzed players, in a band whose catalog is famous for its rhythmic complexity. Her path to that position was neither conventional nor immediate.
From YouTube Breakout To The Clinic Circuit
Nilles built her reputation from the ground up rather than through a single high-profile audition. According to TMZ, the German drummer and composer first drew attention with a 2013 YouTube upload of her original track “Wild Boy,” a release that established her as a player worth watching in an era when online videos had become a genuine route into the professional scene.
That early momentum translated into a recording and touring career. As Modern Drummer documented, she went on to release her debut album Pikalar in 2017. She later toured with guitar legend Jeff Beck in 2022 — a credential that placed her among the small group of drummers trusted to hold down a stage alongside a musician known for demanding precise, responsive playing.
An Unconventional Path Into Music
Her résumé before music reads very differently from the standard conservatory route. A profile from CBC Music notes that Nilles studied social work for five years and worked as a preschool teacher before committing to drumming full time. That decision came only after she had already established a career outside of music.
She then pursued formal training, enrolling at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim. As Yahoo Entertainment reported, that education shaped her as both a performer and an educator, giving her a grounding in popular music and music business that sits alongside her technical development behind the kit.
A Long-Run Reunion, Not A One-Off
Nilles’ role also sits inside a much larger project than a handful of tribute appearances. TMZ reported that Rush announced her as Neil Peart’s replacement for the band’s 2026 tour. Peart died in 2020, and the band returned after an 11-year absence from the stage.
The scope of that return expanded quickly once she had played live with the group. Per WCSX, the run was later extended to 58 global shows following her debut performances, signaling that both the band and its audience were prepared to treat the reunion as a sustained undertaking rather than a short farewell.