Geddy Lee has announced that he will release a memoir slated for fall 2022.
In an Instagram post, the bassist explained that the idea for a memoir came from his lockdown in Toronto during the pandemic — the longest he’d ever spent there since he was 19 and playing the Northern Ontario bar circuit with Rush.
“There were some shiny silver linings to be found at home: teaching my grandson the finer points of baseball and birdwatching, tending to my pups (one of whom was quite ill) and spending the evenings with my lovely better half, glass of Armagnac in hand, as we watched every European mystery show ever produced,” he wrote. “Oh, and another thing: I began to write. Words, that is.”
Lee also said that the memoir helped him properly grieve the death of his bandmate Neil Peart, who died months before the pandemic in January 2020. “My friend and collaborator on the Big Beautiful Book of Bass, Daniel Richler, saw how I was struggling in the aftermath of Neil’s passing, and tried coaxing me out of my blues with some funny tales from his youth, daring me to share my own in return,” he wrote. “So I did — reluctantly at first, but then remembering, oh yeah, I like wrestling with words.”
Lee has been open about how Peart’s death has affected him. In January, Lee gave an interview to Rolling Stone alongside Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson and Carrie Nuttall, widow of the late Neil Peart, where he spoke about what the future might hold.
“For the longest time I didn’t have any heart to play,” Lee told the magazine. “I still feel there’s music in me and there’s music in Big Al, but there’s no hurry to do any of that.”
“I don’t know what I will do again in music. And I’m sure Al doesn’t, whether it’s together, apart, or whatever. But the music of Rush is always part of us. And I would never hesitate to play one of those songs in the right context. But at the same time, you have to give respect to what the three of us with Neil did together. I still am very proud of what we did.”
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