Nor is the experience of reliving Rush’s four-decade history for the documentary necessarily a welcome one. “It’s unwieldy, frankly — I don’t like to think so much about the passage of time. To be involved in the documentary has been hard from that point of view, because they’re making so much of things we’ve done in the past, and asking questions about details twenty-five, thirty years ago — a lot of them have just gone out of my head. It’s a bit uncomfortable dwelling so much on what has happened. I’m more comfortable looking forward and not being constantly aware of how long I’ve been in the same rock band.”
The very business of looking back — through archival footage and photographs — can feel “self-indulgent,” Lee says. “You want to spend your time thinking about things other than your own face.”
