RUSH guitar legend Alex Lifeson spoke with Michael Wright from Gibson recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Gibson: When we spoke last year, you had two songs in the can for Clockwork Angels. How far has work on the album progressed?

Lifeson: "Well, you know, we had six songs written. Those two were the two we decided to record just prior to the tour start, around this time last year. Since then, Geddy and I have been writing. We’ve been writing for the last couple of weeks and I think we’ve got the makings of another song. Pretty close. Some other snippets of ideas. Once we get back into the writing full-steam in the next week or so, with all those bits and pieces, I’m sure we’ll be able to get at least another song or maybe two. In which case, I think we’re looking at eight or nine songs as the magic number."

Gibson: Are you starting to get a sense of when the album might come out?

Lifeson: "Well, you know, that’s been sort of in flux lately because we decided to go back on the road. We finished the last tour and there was such a movement to keep us out there. (laughs) And we gave in to that. You know, our intention was to get into the studio and record as soon as that brief tour ended, but that didn’t quite happen. So we’re back from this tour in July. We’ll take a short break in the summer, start recording in September and hopefully have the new album out for the start of the next tour, which would be in the spring of 2012."

Gibson: Because the songwriting and recording process of the album has been drawn out, on account of the tour, have you found that the material or the concept has evolved beyond what you originally conceived?

Lifeson: "Well, it’s hard to tell because we haven’t really gone back to the old material. Ged and I both really wanted to move forward. You know, if we start listening to the old stuff, we’ll get bogged down with reworking the arrangements. I know exactly what we would end up doing. Instead, we’d rather move forward, continue writing, then look at the whole project and see what needs to be done with it in terms of any other rearrangements or rewriting or anything like that.

Actually, that’s the benefit of looking at this as a long-term project. There’s lots of room and space to update and change things as we go along. In terms of whether it’s deviated from the original concept, it’s a little hard to say. Neil, already, has been talking about rewriting a bunch of lyrics and he has some shifts, I think, in direction maybe in mind, although he hasn’t elaborated on that yet."

Gibson: Another upcoming item related to the tour is your plan to film an upcoming April show in Cleveland, Ohio. Can you talk a bit about the special place that city holds in the band’s heart and history?

Lifeson: "Well, certainly that was the breaking market for us. That’s where Donna Halper, who was the program director at WMMS in 1974, got our first album on an import or as a point of curiosity from a friend here in Toronto who sent it down to her and said, 'You should check it out. Maybe the Cleveland market, which is a pretty heavy, hard rock market, might be interested.' And she played the record in an evening and it got great response and, you know, within days, we got an offer from Mercury Records to release the record. And that was the start of everything. And we did a number of gigs in those very early days in the Cleveland area, so it’s very special. It’s really where we emerged in America. The other thing is, we’ve never done a live video recording in the US And we’ve been all over the place - Europe, Canada, South America - but we’ve never done it in the US, and we really felt that it was time that we did do that. And what better place than Cleveland for us to put a special twist on it?"

Read the entire interview here.