2112 (album)

Rush began to put down musical ideas for 2112 in backstage dressing rooms, hotel rooms and in their touring van during the Caress of Steel tour.[17] As Peart started to write lyrics, Lee and Lifeson would write music that complemented the mood of what Peart was writing about.[20] Most of it was performed on acoustic guitars with the exception of some electric guitar passages with a portable Pignose practice amplifier.[16] They focused on writing music with little need for overdubbing, as they wished to recreate it on stage as much as possible.[21] Lifeson recalled developing "The Temples of Syrinx" backstage at a gig in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in front of their opening act Mendelson Joe.[16] The album was written in approximately six months,[21] with "Overture" being the final piece developed.[22] Rush made a conscious effort to exclude Danniels from the writing and recording sessions, and only played the album to him when it was finished.[16] Musically speaking, 2112 was the first album that Lifeson said "really sounded like Rush".[17]

2112 was recorded in February 1976 across four weeks at Toronto Sound Studios, with longtime associate Terry Brown assuming his role as producer.[23][21][16] The studio was fitted with a 24-track machine manufactured by Studer. Lifeson plays a 1968 Gibson ES-335 for the majority of the electric guitar parts on 2112, with some lead parts played on a Gibson Les Paul Standard. For the acoustic sections, he plays a 12-string Gibson B-45 and a six-string Gibson Dove. His amplifiers were the Fender Super Reverb and a Twin Reverb.[18] A section of "Discovery" features Lifeson playing a Fender Stratocaster that he borrowed from a friend.[17] At the time of recording 2112, Lee was using a Rickenbacker 4001 bass with stereo output; Brown fed one channel directly into the mixing board and then into a compressor, and the other was channelled into Lee's Electro-Voice speakers turned up to the maximum.[16] Upon completing the album, the band expressed an interest in recording in another studio to explore different sounds.[24] Their next album, A Farewell to Kings, was recorded in Wales.

Side one of the album is occupied by the 20-minute futuristic science fiction suite "2112". The seven-part track is based on a story by Peart, the band's primary lyricist, who credits "the genius of Ayn Rand" in the album's liner notes. Rand, a Russian-American novelist, and inventor of the philosophy of Objectivism, wrote the 1937 dystopian fictional novella Anthem, the plot of which bears several similarities to 2112. All members read the book.[25] Peart added the credit to avoid any legal action. In the British paper NME, Barry Miles made allusions of the Rand influence to Nazism, which particularly offended Lee, whose parents were Holocaust survivors.[16] The first and last sections, "Overture" and "Grand Finale", respectively, are instrumental; the "Overture" features an introduction from graphic designer and musician Hugh Syme performed on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer with an Echoplex Delay pedal. Music writer and professor Rob Bowman calculated that in the entire piece, 2:34 of the song contains improvised guitar solos.[16] "Overture" contains the lyric "And the meek shall inherit the earth", a reference to the Biblical passages Book of Psalms 37:11 and Matthew 5:5[16] and borrows a short sequence from the 1812 Overture by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.[16][17]

"2112" tells a story set in the city of Megadon in 2112,[26] "where individualism and creativity are outlawed with the population controlled by a cabal of malevolent Priests who reside in the Temples of Syrinx".[16] A galaxy-wide war resulted in the planets forcefully joining the Solar Federation (symbolized by the "Red Star"). By 2112, the world is controlled by the priests who take orders from giant banks of computers inside the temple.[26] Music is unknown in this world absent of creativity and individuality, but in "Discovery", a nameless man finds a beaten guitar inside a cave and rediscovers the lost art of music.[26][20] In "Presentation", the man takes the guitar to the priests at the temple, who say, "Yes, we know, it's nothing new; it's just a waste of time", and then proceed angrily to destroy it and send him away. Next, in "Oracle: The Dream", the man dreams of a new planet, established at the same time as the Solar Federation, where creative people live.[20] He awakens, depressed that music is part of such a civilization and that he can never be part of it, and kills himself, in "Soliloquy", originally titled "Soliloquy of the Soul".[16] Another planetary war begins in "Grand Finale",[25] originally named "Denouement",[16] resulting in the ambiguous spoken ending: "Attention all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control". Peart described the ending as a "double surprise ... a real Hitchcock killer".[26]

Side two contains five individual songs that display the band's more traditional hard-rock sound and Lee's higher-pitched vocals featured on their previous albums.[20] Lifeson said while having a title track more serious, the rest of the album was to be "just a little lighter and a little more fun".[16] Bowman wrote that the variation of styles on side two offers "a very different listening experience" in comparison.[16] Though the tracks are not specifically about the "2112" concept, they do contain ideas that can relate to its overall theme.[25] Lee wrote the lyrics for "Tears" and Lifeson the lyrics to "Lessons", while Peart wrote the rest.[27]

"A Passage to Bangkok" is a song about marijuana; Lee said it is "a travelogue for all the places in the world that grow the best weed". The track mentions a number of cities and countries, specifically Bogotá, Jamaica, Acapulco, Morocco, Bangkok, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Kathmandu.[22] Rush started to write "The Twilight Zone" at a time when they needed one more song to fill both sides of the vinyl record. The band were big fans of the television series The Twilight Zone and based the track on the stories written for it from its host, Rod Serling.[22] "Lessons" is one of the few Rush songs written solely by Lifeson. For him, the process of songwriting is more seldom and spontaneous in comparison to dedicating time to write, rehearse and scrap parts that do not work.[18] "Tears" is a romantic ballad and is the first Rush track to incorporate the Mellotron, which Syme performs.[22] "Something for Nothing" is a song about freewill and decision making [22] and about how dreams cannot be realized without positive effort. Regarding this song, Peart states: "All those paeans to American restlessness and the American road carried a tinge of wistfulness, an acknowledgement of the hardships of the vagrant life, the notion that wanderlust could be involuntary, exile as much as freedom, and indeed, the understanding that freedom wasn't free. In the mid-1970s, the band was driving to a show in downtown Los Angeles, at the Shrine Auditorium, and I noticed some graffiti splattered across a wall: 'Freedom isn't free', and I adapted that for a song on 2112."

Also known as the 'Starman' logo, the emblem was adopted by Rush fans as a logo since its first appearance in the gatefold of 2112. Peart described the Starman in an interview with Creem magazine:

All [the naked man] means is the abstract man against the masses. The red star symbolizes any collectivist mentality.

On the album art, the "collectivist mentality" is depicted as the Red Star of the Solar Federation, which, according to the plot, is a galaxy-wide federation that controls all aspects of life during the year 2112. The figure in the emblem is depicted as the "Hero". Hugh Syme, the creator of many of Rush's album covers, commented on the design: "The man is the hero of the story. That he is nude is just a classic tradition ... the pureness of his person and creativity without the trappings of other elements such as clothing. The red star is the evil red star of the Federation, which was one of Peart's symbols. We basically based that cover around the red star and that hero."

The logo also appears on seven other Rush album covers: on the backdrop behind Peart's drumkit in All the World's a Stage, their first live album released in 1976; in one of the pictures that is being moved in Moving Pictures; on Retrospective I; on Archives, a compilation album released in 1978; on their 1981 live album Exit...Stage Left, in the background amongst symbols from all their previous work; on their 2003 compilation The Spirit of Radio: Greatest Hits 1974–1987; and on their 2004 EP Feedback. It is also featured on the Canada Post stamp honouring Rush issued 19 July 2013.[28] It also was featured on the front bass drum heads of Peart's drum kit from 1977 to 1983, and again on the 2004 R30 and 2015 R40 tours.