Words matter. These are the best Neil Peart Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
People don’t realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiselled down into a song that has to be sung.
Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I’d done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.
Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.
I’m still no good at ball-and-stick games. If I go play golf with the guys, it’s intended to be a joke.
To get nostalgic about other people’s music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it’s on radio or among friends.
I don’t like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.
Anytime I have an idea, I’ll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don’t have to dream it all out of thin air. I don’t have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.
I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It’s very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.
I’d be very honored to be the ambassador to drum solos.
There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level… I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling… things that require stamina, not finesse.
The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold.
The government’s only functions are to protect the rights of the individual; therefore, you need a police force and an army.
Too much attention and hoopla doesn’t agree with my temperament.
Even as a kid, I never wanted to be famous; I wanted to be good.
It seems to me that’s the only way you can have a truly creative aggregate of people is if they’re all contributing in different ways.
When I started playing, I played in R&B bands. I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that.
When Mr. Ludwig invented the bass-drum pedal, that’s what made the drum set possible.
To me, drum soloing is like doing a marathon and solving equations at the same time.
Racetracks are designed to make it as difficult as possible to get around that corner fast. And some ramps, by necessity, are that way, too.
If drummers are ‘anti-solo,’ that’s up to them. They’re musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on ‘The Tonight Show’, or Gene Krupa.
The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today – in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.
Rudimental snare work is something I’ve always loved.
There’s still a lot I’m angry about, a lot of human behaviour that’s appalling and despicable, but you choose what you can fight against. I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea and it would change things.
I’ve heard the stories. Like, Eric Clapton said he wanted to burn his guitar when he heard Jimi Hendrix play. I never understood that because, when I went and saw a great drummer or heard one, all I wanted to do was practice.
In 2007, I studied with Peter Erskine because I was doing a Buddy Rich tribute concert, and I wanted to take my big-band drumming up a level. I went over to Peter’s house with my sticks, feeling like a 13-year-old again.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will – all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
What is a master but a master student? And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.
I’m learning all the time. I’m evolving all the time as a human being. I’m getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.
The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to… take yourself out of the game.
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.
Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school.
It’s interesting. I’ve known quite a few good athletes that can’t begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.
Do yourself a favor. Don’t ever say to me, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’
For me to call myself a musician, it’s necessary to play live, and it rewards so much – not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour – I feel it at the end of a tour – all that I’ve gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.
If you’ve got a problem, take it out on a drum.
Stamina is the force that drives the drumming; it’s not really a sprint.
When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, ‘If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!’ And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch.
