Geddy Lee made good use of his time in quarantine: He wrote a memoir that’ll be out next year.
The Rush bassist/vocalist writes on Instagram that during the year and a half he spent in lockdown due to COVID-19 — “the longest time I’d spent in Toronto since I was nineteen,” he notes — he passed the time by teaching his grandson how to play baseball, taking care of his dogs, and watching TV mysteries with his wife. “Oh, and another thing,” he adds. “I began to write. Words, that is.”
Lee explains that writing was his way of dealing with the death of his band mate Neil Peart, who passed away January 7, 2020. According to Lee, Daniel Richler, with whom he collaborated on his Big Beautiful Book of Bass, “saw how I was struggling in the aftermath of Neil’s passing, and tried coaxing me out of my blues with some funny tales from his youth, daring me to share my own in return.”
“So I did — reluctantly at first, but then remembering, oh yeah, I like wrestling with words…and soon my baby-step stories were becoming grownup chapters,” Lee continues. He found himself, he says, “scouring my memory banks,” his “diaries and piles of photo albums,” and “piecing together a mystery of a different kind.”
Lee sent his work to Richler, who, he says, “cleaned up some of the grammar and removed a lot of the swearing.” The result, Lee says, is a “presentable, epic-length account of my life on and off the stage…my childhood, my family, the story of my parents’ survival, my travels and all sorts of nonsense I’ve spent too much time obsessing over.”
Lee’s now putting the finishing touches on the book, which will be published by HarperCollins in the fall of 2022.
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