Take One: Action
“Moving Pictures is the cute, sweet, happy offspring [of Permanent Waves]! We learned a lot about writing and how we work best to accomplish our goals.”
Alex Lifeson
It’s quiet out here. Or it was. Canadian country singer Ronnie Hawkins’ estate looks out on to Stoney Lake, a geographical idyll in Peterborough County in central Ontario. The surface of the lake is glassy and dark and so flat it looks like you could step out onto the water and walk to the furthest shore. The day’s a liquid blue, the clouds like pale abstractions or opaque afterthoughts dotted towards the horizon.
The dark wooden barn sits back on the property, away from the main house with its bay window looking out towards the serrated edges of fir trees that sit jaggedly against the sky. The barn rattles and hums all hours of the day and sometimes night. The frenetic writing sessions taking place inside fizz and fade as the orange burns out of the August afternoons. Although the keening guitars, rumbling bass and impossible drum parts aren’t the cause of consternation for the birds dotted among the woods this afternoon: it’s the strange, relentless engine hum overhead, a darting blur of propellor blades and a small engine that sounds like it might choke, stutter and disappear out of sight at any moment.
“Oh,” says Geddy Lee. “Alex [Lifeson] was in the heat of his ‘model aeroplane period’ at that point.” He makes inverted commas in the air with both fingers, faux-exasperated eyebrows arching upwards. “Even Broon [producer Terry Brown] had the stupidest aeroplane you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Lifeson: “I like to have a hobby when we’re working.”
Alex Lifeson is grinning like he’s still got that model aeroplane tucked under one arm and is heading to a vantage point to send it into the sky.
“I had a radio-controlled plane that I built there and crashed into the top of a truck. Might have been Broon’s truck? Bang, right into the top of the cab, put a hole in the roof,” he recalls. “But you should have seen the plane that Terry had. It was on these lines, and you flew it in circles, I guess. And the engine on it was probably 12,000 horsepower, and it went, like, 900 miles an hour. But in a circle.”
Lee: “It was going around and around, getting faster and faster and Terry was holding on to it and getting dizzier and dizzier…”
Lifeson: “And he had to let go of it. He was going around and around, and I was laughing so much that I had to lay down in the grass. There were literally tears in my eyes.”
Lee: “I was standing not too far from him. And when the thing took off, I had to hit the deck! This plane whizzing around overhead tethered to Broon – I mean, it had to come down eventually. He could barely stay upright. It was great. They were fun writing sessions, a good headspace.”
Lifeson: “As long as you weren’t being hit in the head, by, you know, Broon’s or my plane…”
Welcome to the writing sessions for an album.
