Rush, SAP Arena, 10/15/26
Never thought this would happen, but I saw Rush again on Thursday night. This was my fourth show, fourth state, fourth decade. After the death of Neil Peart in 2020, most of us assumed the band was done. And I kicked myself for not going to their last tour when they went through San Jose. So when they announced last year that they were getting the band back together with a new drummer and hitting the road, I immediately went to TicketMaster (ugh) and did as good as I could to get a single ticket in their presale.
That was October 2025. After sitting on the tickets for a full year, I drove down to San Jose after work. SAP Center is the home of the San Jose Sharks hockey team, and is a 20,000-seat arena a bit over from downtown San Jose. I’d never went, but I knew the drive to San Jose would be a pain, and it was. The fifty miles took about two hours, but I bought parking ahead of time, and got there super early, so that was pretty painless.
I paid far too much for a VIP package, and they really have the monetization tiers in full effect for these shows. I got the “Superconductor” package, which meant I got in a special entrance a half hour before everyone else, and there were only a handful of people ahead of me. I got a laminate with a lanyard, a small travel bag, a Yeti coffee mug, and “the opportunity to buy special merchandise” (of course). I picked up a $50 shirt and thought about a tour program, but I’m trying to cut down on collecting more stuff, so I’m good.
My tickets were insanely good. Not only were they the best seats I’ve had to a Rush show, I think they were the best I’ve had to any show. I was on the floor, 23 rows back, in the outside aisle on stage left, Geddy’s side of the stage. I was not at whatever tier had the special VIP lounge and I didn’t see where that was. But these seats were about 75 feet from stage, which were absolutely phenomenal.
I last saw Rush in 2002, on the Vapor Trails tour. This was at MSG in New York, and I guess I didn’t blog about this, didn’t bring a camera, and didn’t write anything in my outgoing email. I just found the ticket stub, and I’d paid $94 to sit in the 7th row of section 104, which wasn’t bad. I had to leave for Vegas the day after the show, and I was sick and loaded up on DayQuil. The weird vibes from this show, aside from not seeing the band since 1994, was that Neil’s daughter and wife had died a few years prior, and this was his first tour back. And I had my own weird vibes at the moment. I was buried in a deep depression at that moment, not sure what I was doing with life, in a funk over Rumored to Exist coming out earlier that year and after seven years of work, suddenly not having a writing project on the front burner.
Rush is an instant time machine for me, a window back into my teenaged years, when I was first obsessed with the trio, and spent every waking hour memorizing their albums. They were the bridge from me listening to Top 40 of the Eighties to the beginnings of thrash metal, prog rock, and everything else that followed. I only knew a couple of people into the band, it became this secret club, an escape from the pain of my reality growing up in a Midwestern town with nothing but a burning desire to escape. (The Rush song “Middletown Dreams” is almost exactly about this, and that deep cut meant a lot to me back then.) Rush isn’t a day-to-day thing for me. I listen to a lot of other music, but maybe once a year, fall down a rabbit hole and dig up the albums and start looking things up online. It’s a nice escape, a touchstone.
But on that 2002 tour, I did feel strange about something. The show was a portal to the past; they did play a lot of deep cuts, things from way back that weren’t in the rotation anymore. This was also nice for me because the new album didn’t really click with me. Geddy Lee’s voice wasn’t entirely there, and he struggled on some of the old stuff. It was good to see them, but the energy was somehow off, in a way I couldn’t explain. I thought maybe I’d outgrown them, or maybe they were phoning it in, or… something. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
24 years later, and I didn’t know what to expect. What I really didn’t expect was that I’d be a few dozen feet away and see a fog-filled stage as the curtain went up, and the first notes of “Xanadu” from their 1977 album A Farewell to Kings come up. One would expect a greatest-hits retrospective to start with “Tom Sawyer” or something similar, so to see them launch into an 11-minute complicated deep cut was mind-blowing.
The evening continued on like this. The set lists for the tour, all meticulously tracked online, were absolutely insane, filled with songs that were no longer played live, dropped from the roster ages ago. Plus, almost like they had a point to prove, they played many long songs. Of the 21 songs they played that night, 12 of them were over five minutes long. And speaking of 2112, they played that side of the album in its entirety. If I told 17-year-old me that I’d be watching them play all twenty minutes of that 1976 album, I would not have believed it.
Anika Nilles, the new drummer: good choice, great player, and she was more than capable in keeping up with the band. This has been written about endlessly, and I’m in agreement with all of that and I’m happy that didn’t turn into a huge disaster with the fans. Also a bit odd, but they filled out the band with keyboardist Loren Gold, who also helps with backing vocals.
The band sounded good; the show looked great, between the lighting and the various kinematics and videos. The crowd was obviously very into the band being back, after everyone thought they were done and over with. Everything was great. But.
I’m hesitant to get too into this, especially because Rush fans are so hyper-exacting, I fully expect someone to tell me “I’m wrong” for having an opinion here. But once again, something felt off to me, and I felt it much more than I did in 2002.
I talked to people before the show, because there is this family, this secret club we’re all a member of, and it’s good to chat about what our first show was, what albums we liked the most, what instruments we play, and so on. The thing is, all of us are now old. I’m old. I’m bald. We’re all bald, wrinkled, bad backs, bad knees, everything else. I get it. But so many of the people I talked to were so stuck in a deep nostalgia rut, the “Music was so good when we were kids and now it’s all this damn auto tune and rap and what is alternative anyway and pull your damn pants up.” Old Man Yells at Sky. It was so depressing, and it made me wonder, “Am I this depressing to talk to?”
And after hearing everyone ramble on about their lost youth, we see the band. Geddy Lee is 73 years old and looks it. Alex, same. As I was watching them, all I could think about is how they looked a generation more aged than last time, like their gait and their posture and their faces all looked so advanced. And for as much as everyone talked about how great Geddy Lee’s voice is on this tour (it was infamously blown completely out on the last few tours in the 2010s), you could tell they were five months into a tour where they’re playing three hours a night. In the second half, Geddy’s voice was noticeably off. I mean, sure I would not do good on any of this stuff as a 25 year old, let alone a 75 year old. And the sound at SAP is notoriously bad, so maybe that was a factor. But to me, I noticed it.
This started a tight eval loop in my head. I was really into Rush as a teenager. Every album bought on the day of release and memorized; every note of every song analyzed and scrutinized; every trip to the record store I ran straight to the R section, thinking maybe some elusive bootleg showed up on CD. Me and my friend Derik, who is the best drummer I know, absolutely worshipped at the altar of Rush, when it really was not cool to do so. They were my first real concert, and for a while, every band I listened to was because they were either a peer band (Yes, Genesis, etc) or the next generation (Dream Theater, Metallica) or an influence of theirs (Zeppelin, Hendrix, Cream). So they are very heavily burned in my brain. And then I think of that, and I see them on stage, hunched over and trying to hang in there, and I think about my parents and I think about me and I think about all the bald guys in the audience stuck in 1976 and I think about the end game here, and it’s incredibly depressing.
And the whole “music is no good anymore” thing. There is so much good music out right now. The only problem is there is too much good music, and it’s all free and available and out there and there are no barriers to making it. The problem is too many choices, too much. And that’s going against this strong feeling that I only have so much time left. I don’t have the free time I had as a teenager, and my relationship to music has drastically changed. And that makes me worry that I need to make more effort or have a better process or better invest my time in this, which is also very overwhelming and depressing.
Anyway, much to think about on that fifty-mile drive home at night, and much to think about going forward. I loved the show and loved the glimpse back, but how do I reconcile all of this and move forward?