A Simple Kind Mirror

Book excerpt: With over 35 million albums sold in their thirty-year career, the Canadian rock trio Rush clearly has been embraced by discerning music fans around the world. The band's musical and lyrical depth and complexity has inspired everything from comic books to novels. Fans on all levels extract varying degrees of meaning and emotion from the band's extensive and ever-changing catalog. This book is one fan's labor of love; an exploration of how the band's lyrical panorama changed from the fantastic to the realistic, from sci-fi adventures to gritty portraits of how humans face the modern world. This is by no means a definitive work exposing what the band's implicit messages and themes convey-that is beyond anyone's scope save that of the band itself. Rather, A Simple Kind Mirror is a song-by-song journey through Rush's 1980 to 1996 offerings, placing the social commentaries covered within. The beauty of this band is that fans can identify with them on many levels and process their messages in personal and individual ways. In A Simple Kind Mirror, Len Roberto explores the foundation of hope and inspiration Rush carries throughout its portfolio.