It's been nearly four years since Neil Peart died, and during the kickoff to his book tour promoting his memoir My Effin' Life, RUSH frontman/bassist Geddy Lee emotionally opened up about the last time he saw his bandmate. The topic came up during the Q&A portion of the event.
“[During the final months of his life, Neil] would listen to a different RUSH album and he would be analyzing it and listening to something he hadn’t heard sometimes since we’d made it,” he recalled [as transcribed by Blabbermouth]. “And by the time that he sadly passed, he had listened to pretty much all the work we had done as a band. And the last time I saw him…”
Lee choked up before continuing. “He wanted to tell me how proud he was of the music we have done together… Some of this stuff is hard to talk about. And it just blew me away that, in that moment, we were sitting on his balcony at his house. And whenever we left him towards the end, we never knew if we’d see him again or not."
“And so we were sitting on his balcony and he was having a smoke, because he loved to have a smoke, like clockwork. And we were talking about what a great moment it was that he was here in this place and we had just seen some parakeets flying into the trees and we both were bird nerds so we could talk about that," he concluded. "But he went on to talk about these songs and what they meant to him and he thought it was very important for me to know that, that our life as a rhythm section together was important to him. So I thought that was beautiful.”
The RUSH drummer died in January 2020 after secretly battling brain cancer for three years. Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson have said that the band would never reunite without Peart; however, Lee sounded more open minded about the possibility in a recent interview.