Rush: Signals

How I Came To Get This: I remember when Rush was an important part of Album Oriented Rock Radio. You couldn’t help but hear one of six of their songs on the Radio: Fly By Night, Closer To The Heart, The Spirit Of Radio, Free Will, Limelight and Tom Sawyer. All of them definitely belonged on AOR radio, and while the latter four showed strong signs of a progressive bent, they didn’t feel out-of-place in a collection which favored BTO, Styx, Foreigner, Kiss and Boston.

So when I heard the synthesizers start off “Subdivisions,” my ears perked up. For the first time since Rock and Roll could still be hated within what was considered the mainstream of American Popular Thought, someone was ripping on Suburbia and getting airplay for it.

I ended up getting this via the RCA Record Club in 1983.

History of the Band: If you don’t, look for some Rush fanatic. Chances are, they’ll tell you the whole story behind them.

Why this LP (when 2112, Permanent Waves or Power Windows could fit in here): First off, Signals is probably the most personal of Rush’s albums…at least up there with Fly By Night and Vapor Trails. Not only that, but the songs on this album are as long as they need to be. This can be said about the earlier albums as well, but it seems that after this LP they seemed to have an overriding idea of how long each song had to last. If they felt that five minutes was the length of a song, each song went between 4 2/3 minutes and 5 1/4 minutes; a six minute target meant songs between 5 2/3 and 6 1/2 minutes. This LP has songs going between 3:43 and 6:24.

Where To Get It: Any store; Amazon.com will also do.