Rush

Progressive trio Rush has nearly finished recording its next studio album, which is due sometime in 2007 via Atlantic. The tracks were put to tape at Allaire Studios in upstate New York with co-producer Nick Raskulinecz. "I have never enjoyed the recording process so much, nor been so satisfied with the results," drummer Peart writes on his site.

Neil Peart went on to relate an instance in the studio when Raskulinecz pushed him to try something out of the ordinary. "We had been working on a complex, syncopated section in one of the songs -- a part that had taken me hours to learn -- and Nick turned to me and said, 'Do you think you could solo over that?'"

"Ha -- what a question! Of course I could solo over it. I'd love to! But I would never dare to suggest such a thing myself," he continued. "When Nick pushed me like that, he would say, 'Hey man, I wouldn't ask if I didn't know you could do it,' and of course that was a kind of challenge. All of us picked up that 'can do' spirit, and it came to express the mood of our sessions at Allaire -- brash, confident, determined, inspired, challenged, fired-up, defiant, excited."

The drummer previously said that some of his lyrics for the new songs were inspired by his motorcycle journeys throughout America, chronicled in the recent book "Roadshow: Landscape With Drums."

"Just seeing the power of evangelical Christianity and contrasting that with the power of fundamentalist religion all over the world in its different forms had a big effect on me," he said.

"You try to put your own way of seeing the world into some kind of congruence with other peoples, and that's difficult for me," he admits. "I mean, I see the world in what I think to be a perfectly obvious and rational way, but when you go out into it and see the way other people think and behave, and express themselves on church signs, you realize, 'Well, I'm not really part of this club.'"

The upcoming studio album will be Rush's first since 2002's "Vapor Trails."