Rush released the live album and concert film R40 Live on November 20, 2015. Recorded at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on June 17 and 19, 2015, it followed Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart through a show built around running the band’s history backward. The music and the equipment surrounding them changed together.
Lee had started developing that idea with director Dale Heslip during the summer of 2014. In an interview with Digital Trends, he explained that he wanted the entire production to travel through time with the songs. “Always from the inception, it had to be a very theatrical show,” he said. The concept went on hold while another tour remained uncertain, then returned after the band agreed that November to a run of 35 shows.
That gave the retrospective a physical shape. Material from Clockwork Angels, including “The Anarchist” and “Headlong Flight,” came near the beginning, surrounded by the elaborate staging associated with that album’s tour. As Rush reached earlier records, crew members exchanged props and equipment to match the periods being revisited. The band’s onstage dryers reappeared during the first set, placing a familiar visual joke inside the larger trip through their catalog.
Choosing those songs meant making room for more than familiar concert staples. Speaking to Guitar World for its March 2016 issue, Lifeson explained that “Limelight” was a candidate to leave out because they had played it on every tour since writing it. Lee said the production’s structure also shaped which albums could fit. R40 Live included “How It Is” from Vapor Trails, a song Rush had never performed live before the tour.
The Toronto concerts also brought “Losing It” to the stage for the first time. Ben Mink, who played violin on the original Signals recording, joined the trio to perform it. That required a fresh arrangement: Lee told Digital Trends the studio version had no electric bass part, so he wrote one for the live performance. Bringing Mink into the show allowed Rush to tackle a song whose violin part had helped keep it out of their concert repertoire.
“Jacob’s Ladder” presented a different problem. The Permanent Waves track returned after an absence stretching back to 1980, but Lee had reservations about its old keyboard sounds. In the 2016 interview, he explained that refreshing those sounds helped the song work for him again. Lifeson described rehearsals turning it into a favorite to play. Revisiting the catalog involved decisions about how the material should work in their hands in 2015.
The release preserved both the performances and the changing surroundings. Fourteen cameras captured the Toronto shows, and buyers could choose the three-CD audio set, DVD or Blu-ray, with combined audio and video packages also available. “Xanadu” restored another recognizable part of Rush’s stage history, with Lee and Lifeson both playing double-neck instruments.
At the end of that backward journey stood “Working Man.” Lifeson recalled that the song gave him and Lee room to respond to each other, with improvisation changing the performance from night to night. Around them, the arena production had become a school-gym scene, complete with a mirror ball and a bass amplifier resting on a chair.
