Geddy Lee was a special guest at the 25th annual Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) Miracle Day charity event yesterday in Toronto. According to reports from a few lucky fans who were there and spoke to the man himself, Geddy said that Rush plans on entering the studio very, very soon and are hoping to then tour this summer. While this is a tentative sort of statement and there has been no official announcement, it's still very encouraging news and seems to corroborate Alex Lifeson's comments from a couple of his interviews over the Summer. In his Prog magazine interview Alex stated the following:

... Tentatively, we start work on the next album in the fall - I did mention it to Ged before he went away on holiday and he sort of looked the other way. Come September and we'll certainly have some plans, we did the last record, or we started on the last album in the fall and I'd like to do that again, start recording maybe. I don't know who might produce, that's some ways off yet. ...

And more recently in an interview with Noisecreep.com Alex said:

... Neil and his wife had a baby just a couple of weeks ago, so he's asked if we can just wait a little bit until he gets settled and see how he feels about getting back to work or when to get back to work. So we're sort of playing it open right now. ... I would guess that sometime in the early fall we would get back together and start writing again, and then hopefully by next summer, we'd be ready to tour.

So all of this leads me to speculate that Neil must have given the thumbs up for getting back to work when the band met in Los Angeles for their November meeting. My guess is that they won't start recording until after the Holidays at the earliest. So assuming all of this is true, we can start speculating about who will produce, where they will record, when the album will be released, when/where they will tour, etc. Let the speculation begin! :)

NOTE: Posts over 10 years old are partially archived. All comments, images and other embedded media have been removed.