Geddy Lee discusses the importance of singing Rush songs in their original keys

Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee discussed the band’s “Fifty Something” tour, which began in Los Angeles on June 7, in a recent interview with Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone magazine, as per Blabbermouth. It is Rush’s first tour in more than a decade and the band’s first run of performances since the legendary drummer Neil Peart of Canadian rock giants passed away in 2020. The “Fifty Something” tour is also Rush’s first, featuring the band’s redesigned lineup of iconic members Lee and Lifeson, German drummer Anika Nilles (who toured with legendary guitarist Jeff Beck in 2022), and recently added keyboardist Loren Gold (best known for touring with The Who and Chicago).

Geddy talked about how he chose to take his first lessons with seasoned vocal coach Mitch Seekins, who works remotely from the little town of Ilderton, Ontario, after more than 50 years of singing professionally.

It was important to me to do as many original versions for our audience as we could, and I didn’t want to have to start changing keys to every song and go into that whole bullshit. So how do I do that? Well, a friend of ours recommended this vocal coach for me. His name is Mitch Seekins, and he’s a terrific guy. He’s a great singer, lives in the country now, and that’s his job. He coaches all kinds of people. It’s really interesting. He coaches opera people. He coaches a lot of rock bands. He coaches one guy who does the play-by-play announcement at a horse racetrack. So, all kinds of people need vocal training, for various [reasons]… He coaches people that, for one reason or another, have started to lose their voice. And so he’s very well-versed in analyzing what you got. So I started with him — what? — about a year and a half ago now. And the first few sessions, he was listening to what I had, and he said, ‘Okay. Well, you’ve got a voice that the muscles are out of shape. So you haven’t sung in 11 years. That’s normal.’ So after the first number of sessions, he said, ‘Well, the good news is you still have that range in there, but we’ve gotta strengthen your voice so you can access it.’ So that became the beginning of this whole exercise regime. It’s no different than going to the gym and getting strong. I go to the gym four days a week, get my body strong. Well, you have to get this muscle [that controls your vocal cords] strong, and that’s what I’ve worked on. And as we went along, he’s very good at getting me to stretch my range and also give me confidence in my range. Part of it is learning new techniques to access your range so that you’re not working so hard to do it. He would look at videos. Sometimes he’d come to rehearsal, and he would video me. I’d go, ‘Well, that’s embarrassing.’ And he would show me the video and say, ‘Look how hard you’re working to hit that note.’ But yet when we’re warming up, you hit that note, and you’re not working hard at all. So you have to learn, while you’re standing there, to breathe at the right time — that’s more than half of it — and to position your vocals and to take a more forensic look at how a voice makes a sound and apply it.’ So it’s been a year and a half, but it’s paying off, and I’m pretty pleased at my progress. I think if I keep working at it, it’ll keep getting better, I think. I hope. And I have to stay healthy.

Geddy agreed with Hiatt when he said that Lee is likely hitting notes that he himself couldn’t envision being able to access again.

I thought, ‘There’s no way I can do that song, there’s no way I can do that song. I can’t hit those notes.’ And he would listen to them and he’d go, ‘Well, that’s an E. That’s high, but you can hit it. You’re doing E in warm-ups.’ And this is not E. This is an octave above everyone’s normal E. ‘And I’ve stretched you out to F sharp. I’ve stretched you out to G.’ … So I was nervous to try some of those songs, and then he would encourage me, and I would do them. And I would struggle at first, and then I’d listen to them with him, and he’d go, ‘No, you can do this. Try this. Breathe here. Remember when you’re singing the choruses of ‘A Farewell To Kings’, make it bounce.’ And that helps. All those little tricks — they’re not tricks; they’re exercises — help you realize, ‘Look, I got this.’

Geddy continued by saying that in the band’s early years, he would sing the iconic Rush songs with more young energy and without any formal education.

[Mitch] said, ‘When I listen to your early records, I can’t believe the way you’re hitting those notes without even thinking about it.’ Because it’s a combination — it’s what they call blending, where you’re blending chest voice and head voice, and I did that instinctively my whole life, and at a certain point, I didn’t really work on the techniques to keep those high songs, so we just started dropping some of those super-high songs. And so that was a challenge for me to bring them back.

Geddy stated this in response to Hiatt’s observation that some of the songs in Rush’s “Fifty Something” set are being performed at a lower key.

‘Anthem”s down a step, and ‘2112’ is down a step. Everything else is in the original key. Well, frankly, ‘Anthem’ sounds much heavier down a step. Sometimes you drop a step to make the song feel more powerful. And although I could do ‘2112’ in its original key, I think it just sounds heavier like this now. Now that’s partly an excuse and partly the truth. So, yeah, both of those songs I don’t think have suffered. We were gonna drop ‘Kings’ originally. And then we went, ‘Nah, it just sounds better in its original key, so we have to keep it in the original key.’ So, we went through the whole catalog like that, judging if the keys were fine and especially with ‘Freewill’. There was no way I would do that song unless I could hit that third verse, which is really the highest verse that I sing all night.