Moving Pictures (Rush album)

Recording

In June 1980, the band ended their ten-month tour of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in support of their seventh studio album, Permanent Waves (1980). During the tour's stop in New York City, the band agreed to start work on a new studio album, rather than prepare a second live album from several recordings they set up during the tour, partly due to the ideas they were developing at sound checks interested them enough to put them onto tape.^[1] Peart was instrumental in doing a new album, and Lee and Lifeson found themselves catching onto his enthusiasm. The trio pitched the idea to their manager and producer who had mapped out a two-year plan for them, but agreed to the sudden change and cancelled the schedule.^[2] After a short break, they regrouped at Phase One Studios in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in July 1980 with members of rock band Max Webster to record "Battlescar" for their album Universal Juveniles. During the sessions, their lyricist Pye Dubois suggested a song that he thought was suitable for Rush to record which was developed into "Tom Sawyer".^[1] Rush then moved to Stony Lake, Ontario to write and prepare material for their new album. The sessions were productive, with "The Camera Eye" the first song to be worked on, followed by "Tom Sawyer", "Red Barchetta", "YYZ" and "Limelight".^[1] Following the initial writing sessions, Rush returned to Phase One Studios with their co-producer Terry Brown and prepared demos of the songs. The band worked on them further during rehearsals of their 1980–1981 tour which began in September, and included "Tom Sawyer" and "Limelight" in their live set prior to recording.^[1]

With the material fully prepared, Rush recorded Moving Pictures in October and November 1980 at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec.^[1] By the time they started the studio was fitted out with a digital 48-track machine, both of which were unfamiliar to the band at first and spent some time familiarising themselves with using the equipment.^[3] Moving Pictures is Brown's first digitally-produced album.^[3] The band made a conscious effort to preserve the quality of their recordings as much as possible by transferring finished sections onto a fresh piece of tape and placing the original copy in storage, thereby reducing the damage to it from frequent playback.^[3] During the sessions they experimented with a pressure zone microphone, a type of boundary microphone that picks up direct sound and no reverberated signals, that was taped onto Peart's chest as he played. The audio captured from it was used to pick up the ambience in the studio room in the final mix.^[4] Peart wore the microphone for the filming of the music video to "Vital Signs".^[4] "Red Barchetta" was recorded in one take. There were problems with equipment failures and they finished the album three days behind schedule.^[1]

Songs

"Tom Sawyer" features a backbeat in a 4/4 time signature with its instrumental and closing sections in 7/4. Peart described the track as "an enjoyable work" which took around a day and a half to record, "collapsing afterwards with raw, red, aching hands and feet".^[4] Its instrumental section grew from what Lee would play on his synthesiser during sound checks on tour, which initially was forgotten about until the band traded ideas on what the section should be.^[1] It became one of the best known songs by Rush and a mainstay of subsequent live shows.

Peart's lyrics to "Red Barchetta" were inspired by the short story "A Nice Morning Drive" by Richard S. Foster, originally written in the November 1973 edition of the American car magazine Road & Track.^[5] Lee described the tale as "Orwellian in nature" which deals with an individual taking their Barchetta on a fast ride despite the banning of high speeds, and is chased after by hovering patrol cars for breaking the rule.^[3] Instead of an MGB roadster as featured in the original story, Peart reported the Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta was the car that inspired the song's title. In 2007, Foster and Peart met for the first time and shared their mutual interest of BMW motorcycles, which was documented in an article titled "The Drummer, The Private Eye, and Me".

"YYZ" is an instrumental titled after the IATA airport code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, with its rhythm a mirror of the letters "YYZ" in Morse code (-.--/-.--/--..).^[4] It stemmed from the band's enjoyment of recording "La Villa Strangiato", a nine-minute instrumental on Hemispheres (1978), which they wanted to do again for Moving Pictures only shorter.^[3] The code was adapted into the song's rhythm of a 5/4 time signature, where the dashes (-) are played using eighth notes and the dots (.) use sixteenth notes.

The lyrics to "Limelight" are autobiographical and based on Peart's own dissatisfaction with fame and its intrusion into one's personal life. The song contains two self-references: the first, the line "living in a fish-eye lens, caught in the camera eye" references the album's following track, "The Camera Eye", while the line "all the world's indeed a stage, and we are merely players", references the title of the band's first live album All the World's a Stage (1976), itself taken from William Shakespeare's comedy play As You Like It.

"The Camera Eye" is a two-part track with sections titled "New York" and "London". Peart wrote the lyrics after taking walks in both cities, recalling observations and the rhythms he felt during them.^[3] It remains the band's last song with a duration over 10 minutes, a frequent occurrence in their earlier albums. Its title refers to short pieces of the same name in the U.S.A. trilogy of novels written by American writer John Dos Passos, one Passos's works that Peart admired.

"Witch Hunt" opens with faint voices, which Lifeson explained were recorded outside Le Studio in sub-zero temperatures with the band and others shouting in a humorous way, and sound effects produced by a synthesizer, before transitioning into the song proper. It features cover designer Hugh Syme on synthesizer^[6] and double-tracked drums in one verse. "Witch Hunt" would become a part of the Fear series of songs, which includes "The Weapon" from Signals (1982), "The Enemy Within" from Grace Under Pressure, and "Freeze" from Vapor Trails.

"Vital Signs" features a sequencer part produced by an Oberheim OB-X synthesizer, and shows distinct reggae flavour. Reggae influences in Rush's music were first heard on Permanent Waves, and would later be heard more extensively on their next two albums.

Artwork

The Ontario Legislature in Queen's Park, Toronto, pictured on the album's front cover

The cover was designed by Hugh Syme who estimated the artwork cost $9,500 to produce. Anthem Records refused to cover the entire bill, leaving the band to pay for the rest.^[7] It is a triple entendre; the front depicts movers who are carrying pictures. On the side, people are shown crying because the pictures passing by are emotionally "moving". Finally, the back cover has a film crew making a motion picture of the whole scene.^[8] It was photographed outside the Ontario Legislative Building at Queen's Park, Toronto. The pictures that are being moved are the band's Starman logo featured on the reverse cover of 2112 (1976), one of the famous Dogs Playing Poker paintings entitled A Friend in Need, and a painting that presumably shows Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. The film crew on the back cover actually shot the scene with film stock, from which the album's front cover is a single frame taken from it. This was revealed to Rush concertgoers several years later when the still image was projected on a large screen behind the band, and then suddenly came to life as a motion picture sequence.

Mike Dixon, one of the movers on the cover of Moving Pictures and the band's next album, Exit...Stage Left (1981), discussed the various people on the Moving Pictures cover. The first, Bobby King, seen furthest to the left on the album cover, was a member of Syme's design team, and is credited for assisting Syme on A Farewell to Kings, Hemispheres and Archives. Dixon explained that King is not only one of the movers, but also the Starman logo and Dionysus (the nude man) on the Hemispheres cover. The mover holding the Starman painting is Kelly Jay, singer of the Toronto band Crowbar who performed a show with Rush in 1973. Photographer Deborah Sammuels is the Joan of Arc character, and her relatives are the family on the right. However, this conflicts with information provided in the Rush biography Chemistry which states: "Hugh borrowed friends, neighbours and even his hairdresser's parents".^[9]

Weekly charts

Singles