There was a bittersweet quality to the first show of Rush‘s Fifty Something Tour, which began on Sunday (June 7) at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, the same place the legendary Canadian rock outfit concluded its last tour in 2015. While elements of these two performances were of course similar, including some overlap in the setlists, this time around the group is without a key element: its late drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, who died of brain cancer in January of 2020.
Fifty Something is the first time the group’s remaining members, singer/bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist/vocalist Alex Lifeson, have toured without Peart in more than 50 years, since the trio rocket-launched out of Toronto in the mid-70s. The loss is unimaginable, not only given this half-century together, but because Peart is widely considered one of the best, if not the best, rock drummers in history.
As such it was only right to put Peart at the center of the affair, with the tour billed as a celebration of his legacy and of the band’s half-century of music. Lee himself said that “Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we f–king miss it … So [we’re] going to hit the road once again to pay tribute to our past and to Neil by performing a vast selection of Rush songs in a handful of cities. No small task, because as we all know Neil was irreplaceable.”
But of course for this to happen, someone would actually have to replace him. That person is German drummer/composer Anika Nilles, whose first public performance with Rush happened during the band’s performance at the 2026 Juno Awards in March and who more than held her own while thundering through some of the most recognizable songs in rock.
The show began at 7:35 p.m., opening with a six-minute intro video that found a trio of young people entering a gothic castle while searching for Rush, encountering characters from the Rush universe, including the sausage-maker introduced during the band’s 2010 Time Machine Tour, the owl from the cover of Fly By Night and Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, who reprised their Rush-loving characters from the 2009 comedy I Love You, Man.
It was a retrospective opening that came before a similarly retrospective show. Check out five standout elements from the tour’s opening night.
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Anika Nilles Makes Her Tour Debut
Nilles was simply put, incredible. It’s an almost absurdly tall order to replace Peart, but if she was sweating the task, Nilles didn’t let on, playing mightily and with tremendous strength and stamina as she powered through the 22-song setlist. Presiding over a sprawling drum kit, Nilles showed that she’s mastered Peart’s signature cascade of drums technique, with her work on especially percussion-forward songs like “2112: Overture / The Temples of Syrinx / Grand Finale” and “YYZ” drawing huge cheers, as did her name when Lee first introduced her to the audience.
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A Refreshingly Phone-Free Environment
At certain points during the show, it was possible to look out into the sections of the roughly 18,000-person crowd and actually count the numbers of phones that were up filming. The dearth of elevated smart phones was even more striking considering that fans were not officially asked to keep their devices tucked away. This largely device-free atmosphere not only gave the night a throwback quality, but created a sense of real presence that made the buzzy performance feel even more kinetic.
Of course, phone cameras were shooting at predicable moments — “Tom Sawyer”‘s guitar solo, “Spirt of the Radio”‘s giddy “ooooof salesmen!” — but even then it was fewer than one might’ve been expected, with far more fists in the air than phones. During the tender “The Garden” many people even held up battery-powered tea light candles, with at least one guy lifting a lighter, just like the old days.
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Jason Segal & Paul Rudd Return to Slappa Da Bass
While the Rush oeuvre is both materially grand and conceptually heady, the night contained a lot of light moments as well. The visual motifs for much of the show were centered around a gothic castle and a spooky circus and amusement park, imagery that at times came off as overtly cartoonish. Things got even goofier and more fun when a video of the South Park cast (playing as Lil’ Rush) was used to introduce “Tom Sawyer,” reaching back to when South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone made the clip in the aughts for use on the band’s 2007 Snakes & Arrows tour.
Also making a reprise were actors Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, who appeared in the show’s opening video as the Rush fanatics they played in the 2009 comedy I Love You, Man. (Roles they also reprised for Rush’s 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.) The duo then appeared onscreen again at the very end of the show to joke about the proper pronunciation of “Peart,” with the I Love You, Man jokes also alive and well among the fans, including two custom-made “Slappa da Bass” t-shirts worn by men in the audience.
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A Decade-Spanning Set
Forty percent of the setlist — which unfolded over two sets broken up by a short intermission — focused on Rush’s hugely influential work from the early ’80s. The band played three songs from 1980’s Permanent Waves, four from 1981’s Moving Pictures and two from 1984’s Grace Under Pressure. But the rest of the setlist acknowledged that Rush also did important work in four other decades, taking from 1975’s Fly By Night, 1991’s Roll The Bones, 2007’s Snakes & Arrows and more. They also created a sort of full circle by incorporating two songs from the band’s final studio LP, Clockwork Angels, with the show closing with “Working Man” from Rush’s 1974 self-titled debut.
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Peart’s Omnipresence
While Lee advised that the tour would “pay tribute to our past and to Neil,” “tribute” seems too small a word for how Peart was thoughtfully and frequently woven into the show. There were two separate instances when his voice came through the speakers, as he first talked about getting into drumming as a kid who was, “smashing pots and pans and my parents got the idea that I liked to hit things with sticks, so for my 13th birthday they gave me drum lessons, this changed everything.” The band then played “Bravado” while a photo montage of the later drummer flashed onscreen.
Later, in another clip, he spoke philosophically about why the musician’s life appealed to him, saying, “I like to be organized, but at the same time I’m restless for movement, for learning, for traveling. That’s my essential contradiction, that’s my yin and yang, my ideal of life is not a well-ordered environment, not a quiet room with everything in its place, but rather my dream is to have a well-packed suitcase and to be on my way somewhere interesting.”
Peart also appeared in various digital renderings, with illustrations of his face intermittently showing up in a cloud bank, in a rock face and, finally, with him drumming in the cosmos. While his spirit would have always been alive in the performance given how much he contributed to the music, the production did a classy and even-handed job in making him a wise recurring presence. Thus even in his sad absence during the show, Peart remained the star of it.