“We always have one song, on every album, that doesn’t quite click. And we thought that Tom Sawyer was going to be the one”: How Rush finally nailed their most famous song

Rush in 1981.

Released in February 1981, Moving Pictures was the biggest selling album of Rush’s career, and arguably the best. But it wasn’t an easy album to make - especially when it came to recording what is surely the band’s best known song, Tom Sawyer.

At the end of the ’70s, Rush had arrived at a crossroads. The masters of progressive heavy rock felt trapped in a world of their own making after a series of fantastically overblown albums – culminating with 1978’s Hemispheres, a brilliant record, but one that the band’s bassist and lead vocalist Geddy Lee considered “formulaic”.