The brutal truth about natural talent no one wants to hear. | Neil Peart

You know, I don't take for granted that people just admire what we do, so whatever we do, they'll admire.

When people talk about boredom, for example, I can honestly say I've never been bored for a second in my life, but I've always found another way not to be.

If you name any band from kind of the mid-'70s, we probably opened for them.

You can't get together with 3 people and say, "Well, we want to have a career spanning over 20 years and have a really loyal audience." Right.

And here's the plan.

Yeah, here's the plan.

When people come up and say something like that, "You influenced me to play drums," I say, "Apologize to your parents for me." I stopped reading reviews long ago because if I believed the good ones, I'd have to believe the bad ones.

It's a good point, and most people Most of my rhythmic growth is evolutionary.

He's a Canadian-American musician and author. He's best known as a drummer and primary lyricist for the rock band Rush. He's received numerous awards for his musical performances. He's Neil Peart, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Number 2 is my personal favorite, so I'm curious to find out which one you guys like the most.

You know, I don't take for granted that people just admire what we do, so whatever we do, they'll admire. No, you know, I feel like, in fact, This is very true. Every audience, I feel like we have to earn them. You know, that we have to earn their dedication and their expenditure of time and energy and money to be there. Every single time, you know, every show. And it's an old show business thing, but I really feel that you're only as good as your last show. And that's the one thing I do like about touring. If you have a bad one, you get another chance.

It seems like you are a man of extremes. Like, you don't just drum, you drum on one of the largest kits there is. You don't just You ride motorcycles, you ride 50,000 miles.

I'm an extremist.

Even when you describe your appetite for reading too, it seems like a voracious appetite for reading. I guess, is that what got you where you are as a drummer?

I would expect that it all comes down to a kind of restlessness, because when people talk about boredom, for example, I can honestly say I've never been bored for a second in my life, but I've always found another way not to be. If I have to go to a medical appointment or something, I bring a book with me, so that waiting is not gonna be a hardship. But the early days of touring, when all that dead time was hanging out, on me, reading, portable, useful, nurturing, all that stuff. So I think I combat, you learn to adapt to your own personality, and the extremes do come in there too. Yeah, I wanted to read every book ever written. Drumming-wise, my determination was more important than talent early on. I think for most things you do have to have a bit of a knack, but I had to work so hard to learn so many things, but I was, relentless in terms of determination. And with traveling, when I've got a day, I'm tempted by what's the most excellent thing I can do, which might be way too far, way too long, but I'm gonna go for that because it's the most excellent thing I can do. And with writing, it just seems unstinting in the same way because I just kind of know when I've done my best on it, and maybe an editor can help make it better, and maybe somebody else could have written it better, but I have a good built-in sense of this is the best I can do.

I'd kind of accepted the definition and applied it myself.

Yes, I'm a compositional drummer.

And then in the same breath, I went, wait a minute, I want to be an improvisational drummer, you know? So, um, so I also pushed myself out of my comfort zone. And even my solos in the past were always improvised over a carefully structured framework, but I wanted even that to be freer, to say, okay, it's a performance in front of people, so it's not going to be like just coming here and playing for a couple hours for myself. It is a performance, and I want it to have a certain standard of repeatability. You know, so that it's going to be satisfying for me and for the audience every night. So that's a hard line to walk too. But I did work over the course of the tour, achieved that, and I think we did 44 shows on this first part of the tour in this summer and this fall, and towards the end I was getting so outside. I remember I thought one day, "Bolero. I'm gonna put Bolero over top of the Chachata one," and did it, you know? And what I love about my warm-up too, it has the same freedom, is that every— About half hour before showtime, I go in and play for 20 minutes and just play. It's the same thing, and I usually, I use those 3 rhythmic elements that are my foundation right now, but there's no consequences. It doesn't matter what happens. So I would just, in my warmup that night, I tried putting a bolero over top of it, and it worked. I said, "Okay," and it went in my solo that night. And that certain freshness that I loved, and I've been building on more the last couple tours, is being able to do that, just say, "Okay," and, I've almost got this, I've almost got this, I'm gonna try it.

We were an opening act for so long and we had a really good relationship with the guys in KISS and their crew and we opened for Aerosmith like 40 times and never got a sound check. And I mean, Blue Öyster Cult, Ted Nugent, if you name any band from kind of the mid-'70s, we probably opened for them because we were an opening act and then we'd start headlining small halls and still be opening shows in between. So we had that mixed bag for a long time, which really, contributed to our balance, I think. You know, we learned a lot about character studies from watching other people, and some of the lyrics that I've written on the subject and thoughts that I've expressed on the subject of fame and celebrity are from witnessing how people like that behaved and handled it, and in turn how they came out.

Neil Peart is the drummer, of course, with Rush. 30 million albums sold. It is quite incredible, over 22 years. This is a fixture on the Canadian landscape. Do you have any understanding why?

No, it's an often asked—

I mean, of course you're talented and good, but—

Well, no, obviously we know that's not enough, even were it true.

But it's an often asked question and one which no one knows the real answer. If they did, they would bottle it and sell it to all aspiring young musicians. But obviously we're glad that it's so, but you can't get together with 3 people and say, "Well, we want to have a career spanning over 20 years and have a really loyal audience." Right, and here's the plan. Yeah, here's the plan. So we just did what we thought was right, made music that we liked, and hoped that other people would too, and so far that's been the secret formula.

Inspiration, I think, is the rewarding thing, and when people come up and say something like that, "You influenced me to play drums," I say, "Apologize to your parents for me." And music is certainly about sharing your enthusiasm, and the nature of Rush is we love our music and we hope other people will like it too. There's nothing calculated more than that about it. And in the writing too, these are things that I was moved to write about and to craft carefully enough that I hope I can share with a reader. And if you do infect them with your fire, oh, that's good, enthusiasm, the literal meaning of enthusiasm is infected with the god. And if you can share that god of yours, that fire of yours, to light someone else's, that's a great thing too.

We talked about the magazine that said you were the best living drummer. There's another poll that brings your lyrics into question. How did you feel when you read that?

Wow, it's stunning.

They said you weren't a very good lyricist, but I'm sure that obviously people disagree with it. But when you read that, how do you feel?

Yeah, you know, you can't help but be stung, you know.

I don't think anyone that I would want to know would be above that, you know. And it's actually a beautiful illustration. Another author, Tom Robbins, I was always a great admirer of his novels, and I loved the way they kept getting better and more adventurous every time. And there was one of his, I think it was Skinny Legs and All, that there was just a scathing review in the New York Times by a moron. So I just— I got angry about it and I wrote to Tom Robbins and said, "Look, as a long-time reader, I just want you to know that your readers are more than satisfied and I love the way you keep progressing, etc." And he wrote me a really nice answer and said, "I stopped reading reviews long ago because if I believed the good ones, I'd have to believe the bad ones." And I took that so to heart and I never read another review.

Well, really, I tend to write for a general reader and in the case of this book, certainly I was writing for someone who doesn't know anything about Rush or rock or motorcycling or any of that and I figure it's my job to make it interesting as the other travel writers that I admire and in every case it was easier with when I'm writing about bicycling in Africa, then it's obviously not a Rush book. When I'm motorcycling around the US or driving and listening to music, it was about music, but it really wasn't about me as a, as a rock drummer. And this time I used all of the same approaches of my ideal audience, someone who's curious and intelligent about stuff, but again doesn't necessarily know anything about my preoccupations. So I was very clearly writing for that imaginary audience in the same way that songwriting is for an imaginary listener, or even when I'm I'm rehearsing for a tour, it's for an imaginary audience that I'm gearing myself up, so there's that kind of, it's an ideal sense, but it's also based on what I would expect from one, 'cause I love reading travel books myself and other people's experiences.

It's a good point, and most of my rhythmic growth is evolutionary, so that what I've worked on grows into something else, grows into something else, but there have been the odd time that I would call epiphanies like that, and there's a rhythm that I used a lot in the late '80s or so, Nigerian music, West African music with slightly displaced accents in it, and I heard that, I was in a village in Togo in West Africa.

On your 10-speed?

Yeah, I was traveling by bicycle that time, and just, I heard this rhythm echoing across the valley, and it was just 2 drummers with hand drums playing it, and it engraved itself on my mind and became a huge influence on me rhythmically after that because I had been listening to King Sunny Ade was a pioneer of Nigerian pop music and a certain rhythmic accent syncopations that it was based on that I was very influenced by at the time and then this other rhythm that I heard that time in Togo was from that same heart and the music that I heard, no, it lodges itself in my brain. It engraves itself in there and And then that becomes something special. And those are rare, I think, when you're suddenly hit by something that's that strong. Reggae, the first time reggae music really got into my soul and I felt that upbeat, downbeat tension. Again, I'll never forget, it was Bob Marley's song Natural Mystic. Yeah. Just sitting in a car and hearing that song, and I suddenly, I got it. You know, I got what reggae was all about, where I'd heard it before but hadn't got it.

You write in your book, 'cause you were talking about the art of writing, you say, and writing and planting roots and everything, you say, "Magic exists, but often requires some planning." But you were talking about writing, I think it seems to also apply to the music even. You have some planning, but then there's that room for improv.

Well said, absolutely so, yeah. All that effort of study, and the early records that the three of us made together, we were experimenting, we were learning how to play our instruments, we were learning how to write songs, we were learning how to arrange, especially through, say, Farewell to Kings Hemispheres, we were learning so much about arrangement instrument and orchestration in the sense of a 3-piece rock band, and all of that gathered together and then by, say, like Moving Pictures, 1980, so we'd been together 6 years by that time, and then we gelled and all of those studies, all those courses of study that we went through together with pure innocence and pure enthusiasm, suddenly they became a unified approach that Moving Pictures and and from then on, carried for us, and then as that time, even from that time, yeah, we continued to experiment absolutely with different kinds of songs, different kind of arrangements, orchestrations of all kinds, different producers, there's another good example. You can get comfortable working with the same producer, and some people do their whole career, but we always felt we wanted new brains to pick and new criticisms, new enthusiasms, just new, new opinions.

Evan Carmichael.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Sam Mack asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the top 10 rules hit you the hardest, had the biggest impact on you, and why. Which one was your favorite? Leave it in the comments and I will join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.