A team dinner conversation led to a longer thought about Rush, retirement, and what their songs have been telling me all along.
June 2026 : 7 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
At my last meal with my direct reports, the conversation turned to music. Specifically, which bands we'd still want to see live. We're all old enough to know that some of the bands we love have either stopped touring, lost members, or carried on past the point where we'd want to remember them.
I mentally went through my favourites - bands I’d bought tickets for over the last couple of years but hadn’t attended due to tiredness or work commitments. Tool, Sleep Token, A Perfect Circle.
Then I thought about Rush. Then immediately complicated it.
I first came across them in my mid-teens. The son of a family friend was away during the Falklands War and I was allowed to leaf through his vinyl collection. Among his Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and UFO 12 inches sat these fascinating album covers by a band called Rush. As I listened to those early records I became enthralled by the strange stories they contained and some of their early songs had stayed with me over the decades.
I never managed to see them in their prime - too busy, too far away, too expensive. Their later albums didn't have the same appeal as the early ones - either they had changed or my musical tastes had. Rush stopped touring some years back. Neil Peart, the drummer who wrote most of their lyrics, died in 2020. The remaining members have recently announced they're going back on the road, with a different drummer where Peart used to be.
Part of me wants to go. Part of me doesn't. Both reactions feel somehow appropriate for the week I'm in.
"Working Man"
The first Rush song most people came to was Working Man. 1974. The album that announced them. It's about the grind of repetitive labour, the suspicion that there ought to be more to a life than the daily clock-in and clock-out. The lyrics are specific and unromantic. The narrator is exhausted, suspects he's missing something, and articulates the trap without articulating his way out of it.
The song was written when the band themselves were doing day jobs around the music. Within a few years, they wouldn't be. Within a decade, they were one of the most successful rock bands of the era. The men who wrote Working Man went on to spend forty years not being working men in the sense the song meant.
I've thought about that arc a lot recently. The song defines an experience by its constraints. The band's career was, in some ways, a long answer to the song. They didn't escape work in the obvious sense. They made the work the thing they wanted to do.
Most retirement-blog content treats stopping work as the relief from working-man-ness. I'm not sure that's quite right. The real relief, looking at it now, is when the work you do becomes the work you'd choose to do anyway. Rush's career exemplified that. I enjoyed my own career but the distance from home made it less fulfilling. The retirement I'm walking into is partly an answer to that gap.
"Free Will"
Free Will is the song that's been most useful to me over the last eighteen months. It's from Permanent Waves, 1980. Peart wrote the lyrics, as he wrote most of them. The argument of the song is that refusing to make a choice is itself a choice. That waiting for the world to decide for you is its own kind of decision. That agency is the responsibility you can't really hand back.
I returned to that song, mentally, more than once during the months before I resigned. Every time I pushed the decision back, every time I came up with another reason that this wasn't quite the moment, Peart's argument was the voice in my head asking whose decision I was actually deferring to.
The song doesn't tell you what to choose. It refuses to let you pretend you haven't.
"Grace Under Pressure"
Grace Under Pressure is the title of their 1984 album and probably my favourite. The phrase itself comes from Hemingway, who used it to describe what courage actually looks like. The album is a meditation on coping with difficulty, holding yourself together when external forces are pushing on you.
That's the thing I've been trying to do in these final weeks. The team is rehearsing how the role works without me. I'm being left off emails I'd have been on a month ago. The Teams messages don't come the way they used to. I'm there but I'm not.
The natural temptation in that situation is to react: insist on staying involved, complain about being sidelined, read every small omission as a slight. The Hemingway phrase, and the album's argument, is that you can choose not to do that. You can be the person who notices the shift, doesn't take it personally, and continues to show up professionally for the time you have left.
Grace under pressure is staying warm and useful even as you're becoming a ghost in the system. It's harder than it sounds, and easier than reacting badly. That's the rule I'm trying to follow in these last few days.
"Xanadu"
Xanadu is the long one. Eleven minutes. From A Farewell to Kings, 1977. The lyrics are loosely based on Coleridge's Kubla Khan, but Peart did something specific with it. The narrator of the song achieves immortality by drinking from the sacred river, and then realises he's trapped in the paradise he sought. Eternal life turns out to be eternal isolation.
I've thought about Xanadu a few times during the working-from-home era. The thing you wanted, granted, turning out to be subtly different from what you wanted. The corporate Village is its own kind of Xanadu. Comfortable, well-appointed, theoretically pleasant. Also a trap that the inhabitants can't quite leave even when they want to.
The retirement I'm walking into isn't Xanadu either. The aim isn't paradise. It's just somewhere I'm not trapped.
"Closer to the Heart"
Closer to the Heart is the short one. Three minutes. From A Farewell to Kings, the same album as Xanadu. The song that always opened or closed the live shows. The argument is straightforward: the work matters less than the people you do it with. The structure of the job is surface. What's actually important is closer to the heart than any of that.
I've thought about the song a lot in the last few weeks, particularly since the meal with my team. The role and the structure are things I'm walking away from without much regret. The team isn't. The people I worked with closely enough that their progress is one of the things I'm proudest of from this whole stretch. Two direct reports whose careers are part of my own arc. Those relationships are the closer-to-the-heart bit. The meetings, the reorganisations, the storyline pivots were all infrastructure.
The song doesn't tell you what to do with that observation. It just names it. The naming is what's useful right now.
"Time Stand Still"
Time Stand Still is the song I didn't appreciate when I was younger. From Hold Your Fire, 1987. Geddy Lee said in interviews that the song was about the band looking back at where they'd been and wishing they'd been more present for it. The lyric asks the universe to slow down so that what's passing can be properly noticed. It's a request the universe never grants.
I'm 58. I have been hearing this song on and off for nearly forty years. For most of those forty years it sounded sentimental to me. It doesn't any more. Now it sounds like exactly the right thing to ask the universe, even knowing the universe won't comply.
The last few weeks have given me a small version of what Peart was writing about. Time hasn't stood still. But I have noticed it more.
"Exit Stage Left"
The album of that name came out in 1981 and is another favourite. The phrase itself is Snagglepuss, Hanna-Barbera, the cartoon catchphrase that the band borrowed for the live record. It means leaving the scene without making a fuss, on your own terms.
That's what I'm trying to do. Not exit centre stage to applause. Not exit pursued by a bear. Exit stage left, off to the wings.
The reunion
Which brings me back to the question my team asked at dinner. Would I see Rush, now, if I could?
The honest answer is probably no. The version of Rush that would have lined up with the version of me that needed to see them was 1984, somewhere in London, before any of this happened. That show isn't available. The reunion is a different band, missing the member who made them what they were, performing for an audience who are mostly there to honour what was rather than what is. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not the show I missed.
The deeper reason, though, is that I think Rush's career taught me something specific about what closure looks like. Three serious men who took the work seriously for forty years, stopped when they had to, and let it be over. Peart's death made it irreversible. Lee and Lifeson have reconsidered. That's their right. Maybe the new tour will prove me wrong about the appeal of coming back. Maybe I'll be drawn back in, if it's something I have a passion for.
But what they did originally, deciding to stop, was the model that landed with me. Not because it was the only valid model. Because it was the one that matched something I needed to see done.
I'm exiting stage left in a few working days. The soundtrack has been Rush, on and off, since I was a kid. It's still Rush.
I've already bought tickets for a few concerts for later in the year - hopefully I won't be too tired for these ones.
A few working days left of being a working man. After that, I won't be.
Update:
I saw the recordings of the first return gig and was genuinely blown away - Anika was amazing and to see the band return and play many of the classics sent shivers down my spine and almost brought a tear to my eye. I'm still not sure I'd pay over £100 for a ticket to see them but the World is a better place knowing that others can experience their music.
- Further Reading:
- 21 Working Days Until I Hand Back the Company Laptop
- Be Seeing You: The Prisoner, Portmeirion and Why I Finally Understand Number 6
Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk.
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