Grace Under Pressure (Rush album)

Background and production

During the tour supporting their previous album, Signals, the members of Rush began by meeting with producer Terry Brown in Miami, informing him that they wanted to move on. Unhappy with the sound of the Signals album, they were also keen to see how they would work with someone other than Brown. Despite their decision to part ways Rush included a small tribute to him in the liner notes of Grace Under Pressure, which states "et toujours notre bon vieil ami — Broon." The quote translates to "and always our good old friend." Following Brown's amicable departure, Rush approached producer Steve Lillywhite to record the album but he ended up working with Simple Minds instead. Rush eventually produced the album themselves, with assistance from Peter Henderson, who had previously worked with Supertramp, Split Enz, Wings, Frank Zappa and King Crimson.

The album was recorded at Le Studio. Current events found in the Toronto-based newspaper The Globe and Mail inspired much of the lyrical content of the album, particularly "Distant Early Warning", "Red Lenses", and "Between the Wheels". After a few months, the mixing stage had begun, and Neil Peart discussed the details of the cover art with Hugh Syme. The band spent up to fourteen hours per day in the studio, perfecting the album's dystopian sound.

A music video produced for "The Enemy Within" would be the first played by the Canadian music television channel MuchMusic, which launched in August 1984.

Style

Musically, the album marks yet another development in Rush's sound; while continuing to make extensive use of synthesizers as on Signals, the band also experimented by incorporating elements of ska and reggae into some of the songs. As well, the guitars played a larger role than on Signals, with Lifeson stating that "I think the guitar on 'Signals' took a bit of a back seat. The keyboards were really upfront ... though in a sense that's what we were trying to achieve, we wanted to go for a different perspective on the whole sound. But, possibly, we lost direction at times on Signals."

Track listing

All lyrics written by Neil Peart; all music composed by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.

Personnel

Charts

Album

Remaster details

A remaster was issued in 1997.

Grace Under Pressure was remastered again in 2011 by Andy VanDette for the "Sector" box sets, which re-released all of Rush's Mercury-era albums. Grace Under Pressure is included in the Sector 3 set. Unlike the other albums in the "Sector" series, the remaster for Grace Under Pressure was based on the 1997 digital masters, as opposed to the original master tapes, which were sonically degraded by 2011.

Grace Under Pressure was remastered for vinyl in 2015 by Sean Magee at Abbey Road Studios as a part of the official "12 Months of Rush" promotion. The high definition master prepared for this release was also made available for purchase in a 24-bit/48 kHz digital format at several high-resolution audio online music stores. These remasters have significantly less dynamic range compression than the 1997 remasters and the "Sector" remasters by Andy VanDette. Sean Magee remastered the audio from an analogue copy of the original digital master, using a 192 kHz sample rate. But since Grace Under Pressure was originally mixed on digital equipment at 16-bit/44.1 kHz, no audio above 22 kHz exists in the original digital master or any of the remasters, which is why many digital music stores are only selling the album at a maximum sample rate of 48 kHz.