Geddy Lee on Feeling Neil Peart’s Presence in a “Spooky” Bird Encounter

Geddy Lee has rarely avoided the subject of Neil Peart since the drummer’s death in 2020. But a story from the start of his current tour introduced something stranger than grief.

In a recent interview, the Rush vocalist and bassist recounted a moment on opening night when a bird appeared backstage in a way that felt, to him, like Peart’s presence. Lee did not frame it as metaphor or wishful thinking. He described it as immediate and deeply uncanny—the kind of event he later called “spooky.” No dramatic staging, no lyric cue. Just a bird, a quiet corner, and an instant that transported him.

The band’s own catalog offers a dozen mystical frameworks for such a story, but Lee didn’t lean on them. His tone was observational, almost matter-of-fact, as though the encounter simply registered before any rational filter could challenge it. For an artist who spent decades building worlds with Peart’s lyrical precision, the episode carried a different weight: not resurrection, not closure, but a momentary flicker of connection that felt physical.

Rush ended as a live entity with Peart’s retirement and subsequent death, making any stage Lee now occupies a landscape of absence. A bird on the first night might mean nothing. On this tour, to this musician, it meant something else entirely.