There is a particular kind of knowing that only reveals its gaps when someone else asks you to explain it. For Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, that moment came with drummer Anika Nilles, who stepped into the impossible seat once held by Neil Peart. According to Rolling Stone, the two Rush veterans found that teaching their own catalogue to a new player forced them to confront how much of it they had always understood by instinct rather than by analysis.
Learning Through Anika’s Learning
The question put to the pair was pointed: what did they learn about the drum parts to Rush songs that they had not quite grasped until they had to communicate them to someone new? Lee’s answer reframed the exercise entirely — the teachers became students. He explained that watching Nilles absorb Peart’s approach gave both of them a fresh angle on the architecture of their own music.
“We were learning what Anika was learning,” 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.”
The Time Signature That Nobody Counted
The practical problem surfaced in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to transcribe a Rush song. Nilles would write to Lee with a simple question: what time is this part in? Lee found himself without a clean 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!’ So I would go back and listen to it, and I would count it out,” he recounted. What the counting revealed was that Rush had not built these passages from a time signature first; they had assembled musical phrases and let the meter fall where it fell. “We knew it intrinsically. We knew it inherently,” he said.
The re-education came down to details Lee had never needed to name out loud — whether a passage held a bar of eight or a bar of six, or whether, as Nilles suspected, it was all in seven. “So it was a re-education for me,” he admitted.
The Subtle Weight of Neil Peart
Lifeson’s observation approached the same truth from a different angle, one rooted in physicality rather than counting. He noted that spending so much time with the material made it apparent how Peart would shift his weight so subtly — leaning forward or back — in the spaces between the big moments. That imperceptible adjustment, Lifeson argued, was the glue holding everything together. It became far more visible once someone else had to occupy the same position.
What the Exchange Reveals
Taken together, the two accounts describe a band whose music was, in part, unconscious — composed and rehearsed by feel, then retroactively decoded for a new interpreter. The passage from Nilles’ questions back to Lee’s listening sessions is not a story about forgotten notes so much as a story about inherited vocabulary. Rush’s odd meters were never a puzzle the members solved on paper; they were simply how the phrases landed. Explaining them demanded a second, more analytical pass at material they had known only by touch — a process that, as Lee describes it, changed how he heard his own work.
That re-education also has a wider context. It took place while Rush was back on stage for the first time in more than a decade, with Nilles behind the kit. The conversation between Lee, Lifeson and Rolling Stone is therefore less a nostalgic aside than a snapshot of a band actively rebuilding its own music in public — and of the drummer who made that rebuilding necessary.
Who Anika Nilles Is
According to Rolling Stone, Anika Nilles is a German drummer, composer and educator who built her reputation largely outside the traditional rock pipeline. She launched her career on YouTube in the early 2010s. She has released three full-length albums with her backing band Nevell, including Pikalar (2017) and For a Colorful Soul (2020), as catalogued by Scrobble. Before Rush called, she had already established a distinct identity rooted in jazz, fusion and her own solo work.
That pedigree matters to the story Lee and Lifeson are telling. Her background sits well away from the hard-rock tradition Peart helped define. As Blabbermouth noted, she toured with legendary guitarist Jeff Beck in 2022 — an appointment that signalled her standing among players long before she was asked to interpret Rush’s catalogue. An outside voice asking basic questions about meter was precisely what turned into a re-education for Lee.
The Fifty Something Tour
According to Boston.com, Nilles’ arrival is tied to a comeback of considerable scale. The “Fifty Something” run is a 2026-2027 trek of 86 nights spanning three continents and 17 countries. It is the band’s first tour since Neil Peart’s death, with Lee and Lifeson joined on stage by Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold.
Reporting from Planet Rock puts the itinerary at roughly 92 dates, opening in Los Angeles in June and reaching the UK and Europe in spring 2027. Lifeson has said he has “totally fallen in love” with touring again. Reviews such as Ultimate Classic Rock‘s assessment of the run describe Nilles as honouring Peart while having fun with the material once the challenge of learning the parts had been worked through.
Neil Peart and the Art of the Odd Meter
Peart’s reputation rests in part on making mathematically complex rhythm feel organic rather than academic, a quality the Boston Globe traced through 50 years of the band’s catalogue. Instrumentals such as “YYZ” and “La Villa Strangiato” are regularly cited as the clearest examples of that balance. Both have featured in the current tour’s setlists, as seen in footage of the instrumental trilogy performed live on the Fifty Something Tour.
That is exactly the difficulty Lee describes. The parts were never learned as equations but as passages — phrases glued together until they felt inevitable — which is why a bar of eight or a bar of six could go unexamined for decades. Peart’s legacy, in that reading, is not a set of time signatures to be memorised but a way of hearing rhythm. Handing it to a new drummer required the surviving members to translate instinct into instruction for the first time.
