Guitar World has dusted off a 1996 interview with Rush guitar legend Alex Lifeson, where dissects Rush anthems from "2112" to "Limelight", "The Spirit Of Radio" and many more. Following is an excerpt.

"La Villa Strangiato" - Hemispheres (Polygram, 1978)

Lifeson: "That was all recorded in one take. Because we were writing on the road, we used our soundchecks to run through songs that we were going to record. We would come off the road, have a few days off and start recording. It was all recorded at the same time with all of us in the same room. We had baffles up around the guitar, bass and drums and we would look at each other for the cues. My solo in the middle section was overdubbed after we recorded the basic tracks. I played a solo while we did the first take and re-recorded it later. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the other solo ghosted in the background.

That was a fun exercise in developing a lot of different sections in an instrumental. It gave everyone the chance to stretch out. By that time I had my ES-355, and my acoustics were a Gibson Dove, J-55 and a B-45 12-string. I had my Marshall in the studio. I had the Twin and two Hiwatts, which I was also using live, but the Marshall was my real workhorse. The Boss Chorus unit had just come out at that time, but I think I used a Roland JC-120 for the chorus sound here. That was the first of many ‘chorus’ albums."

"New World Man" - Signals (Mercury, 1982)

Lifeson: "Most of Signals was completed, but we wanted to add one more song. Neil had been fooling around with the lyrics, so we wrote and recorded 'New World Man' in the studio all within one day. It has a very direct feel. Doing that in one day was a lot of fun. The pressure was on but off at the same time. It was almost compulsory to do solos at that time, but I didn’t want to feel that every song had to have that kind of structure. I wanted to get away from that, and to this day I feel that way. I enjoy playing solos and I feel that my soloing is quite unique to my style, but I’m bored with that structure. I used a Tele for the whole song through the Hiwatts with a little bit of reverb and chorus."

"Show Don't Tell" - Presto (Atlantic, 1989)

Lifeson: "By then we were working with Rupert Hine as our producer. Oddly enough, I had been working on the basic ideas of that song at home and brought it to the studio when we started writing the record. We developed it from there. It was much heavier in the early version. The tempo had come up a little bit.

Rupert’s approach to the guitar sound was a little lighter than I wanted. That was partly my fault, because I was still using the Signature a lot, which didn’t lend itself to a very thick sound. That amp line-up stayed the same as before, and effects would come and go. I was fiddling around with whatever was new at the time, as I’ve always done. We’d taken a seven-month break, which at that time had been our longest hiatus. We needed to clear the cobwebs and get away. We came into Presto feeling a lot more enthusiastic about working. The change to Atlantic Records was good because we felt like we needed a change all around. We were going into the '90s, and it made everything fresher."

Read the complete interview here.