Hemispheres (1978)
Hemispheres is a 1978 classic rock album by Rush.
Eighteen minutes of side one go to a single piece of music. "Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres" picks up the black hole voyage Rush left hanging at the close of A Farewell to Kings and turns it into a dispute between Apollo and Dionysus, reason on one side and feeling on the other, with Geddy Lee singing near the ceiling of his range and staying there for the duration.
Rush went back to Rockfield Studios in Wales with long-time co-producer Terry Brown, and this time arrived with almost nothing finished. Weeks of writing and arranging happened in the room, against their usual habit of walking in with completed songs, and the sessions turned into the hardest of the band's career.
Side two lets the album breathe. "Circumstances" runs short and sharp, "The Trees" builds a fable out of maples and oaks that fans have argued about ever since, and "La Villa Strangiato" closes with nine and a half minutes of instrumental, subtitled "An Exercise in Self-Indulgence" and said to have taken longer to cut than the whole of Rush's debut. Alex Lifeson's solo through its middle section is the passage guitarists tend to single out.
This was the last side-long suite Rush wrote. The songs got shorter and the synthesisers moved forward soon after, which leaves Hemispheres as the peak for anyone who came to this band for the long form.
Similar albums
Explore Hemispheres guides
Hemispheres in our writing
- Where to Start: The Most Emotional Reunion of the Summer
A few thoughts on Hemispheres
Roadshow: Landscape With Drums has Neil Peart writing prose with the same precision he brought to these lyrics, riding a motorcycle between arena dates and setting down what three decades of the job cost him. Start there if the words on this album held you as much as the drumming did.
Heavy Metal launched in 1977 and shared an audience with this record almost exactly: Moebius and Druillet drawing the same star systems Peart was writing about and Hugh Syme was painting on the sleeve. Dreadstar carries the cosmic space opera further, for the Cygnus half of the album. For the other great seventies band assembled around a rhythm section, Becoming Led Zeppelin runs on archive footage and lets the players talk.
Albums that give a whole side to one piece of music
Side one of Hemispheres runs eighteen minutes as a single composition in six sections, with no radio edit anywhere in sight. Rush built most of it in the room at Rockfield instead of arriving with the parts written. These records make the same bet on long form, handing a whole side to one piece and bringing its themes back changed by the end.
Rush albums after they stopped writing suites
Hemispheres took so long to write that Rush came out of it finished with side-long suites. Geddy Lee had also sung all of side one near the ceiling of his range, and he brought the keys down afterward. These are the records that followed: shorter songs, more keyboards, the same trio still setting reason against feeling.
Books and films about the musicians behind the long songs
Neil Peart wrote the Apollo and Dionysus argument on Hemispheres at twenty-six, then spent decades writing prose about the road as well. These put you with the people who make music on this scale: prog and arena rock on the page and on film, studio weeks that produce four songs, and the work of playing an eighteen-minute piece nightly.
If the black hole voyage is the part you liked
Cygnus X-1 Book II resumes a trip into a black hole that Rush left hanging a year earlier, then gives the destination two Greek names and an argument to settle. These pull on the same threads Peart did: the physics of collapsed stars, space travel written as an expedition with logistics, and old myth borrowed to give the journey a shape.