Neil Peart has topped many ‘Best Drummer’ lists and rightfully so as is evidenced by his technical and musical prowess. Below are some of his best quotes to give you inspiration and motivation-
“A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission.”
“Anytime I have an idea, I’ll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don’t have to dream it all out of thin air. I don’t have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.“
“Art gives a spiritual depth to existence– I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books.”
“Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I’d done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.”
“Even as a kid, I never wanted to be famous; I wanted to be good.”
“Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with.”
“For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics – I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I’m playing.”
“For me to call myself a musician, it’s necessary to play live, and it rewards so much – not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour – I feel it at the end of a tour – all that I’ve gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.”
“I am the audience. I want to observe people. Even when I’m playing drums onstage, I’m watching people. I’m looking at them and their faces and their T-shirts and their signs. And travelling by motorcycle, especially, the world is just coming at me.”
“I’m learning all the time. I’m evolving all the time as a human being. I’m getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.”
“I remain the optimist: you just do your best and hope for the best. But it’s an evolving state of mind.”
“I think, in music, you’re always hoping that you’ll have a like-minded audience and that the music you like making will appeal to them, too.”
“I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.”
“I want to be an improviser, and I’ve worked very hard at that. It’s an art. You don’t just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do.”
“If drummers are ‘anti-solo,’ that’s up to them. They’re musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on ‘The Tonight Show’, or Gene Krupa.”
“If you’ve got a problem, take it out on a drum.”
“If you fail once, or if your luck is bad this time, the dream is still there. A dream is only over if you give it up- or if it comes true.”
“It’s interesting. I’ve known quite a few good athletes that can’t begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.”
“It’s not the music you hear in your head that other people are going to hear. You have to be able to make it true enough to the image in your head, and that’s where technique and technology come in, for sure, and knowledge. It’s not true and will never be true that someone who knows nothing can sit in a basement and make great music.”
“It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level… I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling… things that require stamina, not finesse.”
“Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.”
“Live shows were always religion for us. We never played a show – whether it was in front of 15 people or 15,000 – where it wasn’t everything we had that night.”
“Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, ‘Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer.'”
“One likes to believe in the freedom of music”
“Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had – all of those were conceived to be performed.”
“Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will – all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.”
“Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.”
“Rudimental snare work is something I’ve always loved.”
“Stamina is the force that drives the drumming; it’s not really a sprint.”
“The real test of a musician is live performance. It’s one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.”
“The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to… take yourself out of the game.”
“To get nostalgic about other people’s music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future.”
“We don’t want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn’t what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output – each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.”
“What I’ve learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal – or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.”
“What is a master but a master student? And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.”
“When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, ‘If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!’ And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch.”
“When Mr. Ludwig invented the bass-drum pedal, that’s what made the drum set possible.”