metalNESS wrote:
oh boy oh boy! 2011 though?
There are several reasons for this:
1. They are trying to go back and do what they did in the 80's. Back then, they would do a short mini-tour previous to recording new material to pre-release new material they had worked on. I don't think they were doing it to gauge the fan reaction. Probably, in my opinion, to allow the songs to progress and change little bit over time to see what worked before recording. They aren't doing it this way strictly this time, which leads us to...
2. A rush tour is very expensive and quite frankly makes a bit too much money these days for them to go out for a month, work a couple new songs into the setlist and then record the album. So there is going to be a normal long summer tour.
3. They are going to be selling singles from the album long before it comes out. I personally hope they re-record everything when they record the new album, because that would be the old school way of doing things. If they would have done this for Power Windows, for example, the pre-release versions of the songs were longer, so we would be stuck with 7 minute long versions of songs.
4. In addition to the previous, no record label (remember, Anthem is a "vanity label") is going to allow anyone to release music too often these days. They want to extend the market appeal of releases as long as possible. The wanna sell the singles this tour and the album on next year's support tour. Remember, Rush can whatever the hell they want in Canada, but that doesn't mean Atlantic will follow suite in the rest of the world, where they control the band's recoded output. Rush are one of those few bands that control their output, but Atlantic has a lot more control than I think people realize.
