Power Windows (album)
| Power Windows | ||||
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| Studio album by Rush | ||||
| Released | October 15, 1985 June 3, 1997 (Remastered CD) |
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| Recorded | April-August 1985 | |||
| Studio |
The Manor Studio, Oxfordshire; Sarm East Studios, Angel Studios and Abbey Road Studios, London; AIR Studios, Montserrat |
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| Genre | Progressive rock, new wave | |||
| Length | 44:44 | |||
| Label |
Anthem (Canada) Atlantic (Japan) Epic/Sony (Japan) Mercury Vertigo (United Kingdom) |
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| Producer | Peter Collins and Rush | |||
| Rush chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Power Windows | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Rolling Stone | (favourable) |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  |
| Kerrang! | |
| Rock Hard (de) | 9/10 |
Power Windows is the eleventh studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released in 1985. Recorded at The Manor and Sarm East Studios in England, and AIR Studios in Montserrat, it was the first Rush album produced by Peter Collins, and the first to be released directly to CD.
Power Windows introduced more synthesizers into the band's sound. The music videos for "The Big Money" and "Mystic Rhythms" both received significant play on MTV. During the period when the album was produced, the band were expanding into new directions from their progressive rock base, having "tightened up their sidelong suites and rhythmic abstractions into balled-up song fists, art-pop blasts of angular, slashing guitar, spatial keyboards and hyperpercussion, all resolved with forthright melodic sense".
In February 1985, work started at Elora Sound in Canada for three weeks, in a barn with a 24-track studio. Vocalist and bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson were working on songs that could fit the lyrics drummer Neil Peart wrote at a small desk there, with Peart at the same time trying to write lyrics adaptable to Lee and Lifeson's music. During his time there, Peart researched the Manhattan Project to prepare to write lyrics for the song of the same name. He also wrote rough outlines for "The Big Money," "Mystic Rhythms" and "Marathon". Lee and Lifeson sorted through jams and Lifeson’s riff tapes to write music for these songs, with each song taking up to a week. They then began on "Middletown Dreams", "Marathon" once again, and then "Grand Designs".
Peart went through tapes to the five new songs in a Miami hotel room in March, getting ready for the warm-up tour gig in Lakeland, Florida. At this point, the band met up with engineer James "Jimbo" Barton, recommended by producer Peter Collins. Later at Elora, the songs whose lyrics Peart was formerly struggling with, "Territories" and "Manhattan Project", began to come together. Peart was also working on lyrics to a ballad called "Emotion Detector", which seemed to work perfectly with the music they were jamming on at the time. The music to "Territories" was also arranged, and a tape of seven songs was created. They had trouble with writing the music to "Manhattan Project", but Collins contributed ideas to this and other songs.
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