Canadian rock legends Rush kicked off their R40 Live 40th Anniversary Tour on May 8th in Tulsa, OK the BOK Center. Fan-filmed video of the An Evening With... show can be viewed below along with the career-spanning setlist. Each set - three in total - is preceeded by an intro video.

R40 will visit 34 cities throughout North America this summer, finishing August 1st in Los Angeles, CA. These not to be missed concerts will highlight four decades of the band's music. Complete tour details can be found here.

Set 1:

"Clockwork Angels"
"The Anarchist"
"Headlong Flight"
"Far Cry"
"Main Monkey Business"
"One Little Victory"
"Animate"
"Roll The Bones"
"Distant Early Warning"
"Subdivisions"

Set 2:

"Tom Sawyer"
"Red Barchetta"
"The Spirit Of Radio"
"Jacob's Ladder"
"Cygnus X-1 Book Two: Hemispheres - Prelude"
"Cygnus X-1 Book One - The Voyage: Part 1"
- drum solo -
"Cygnus X-1 Book One - The Voyage: Part 3"
"Closer To The Heart"
"Xanadu"
"2112 Overture/Temples of Syrinx/Presentation/Grand Finale"

Encore:

"Lakeside Park"
"Anthem"
"What You're Doing"
"Working Man"

Fender.com recently caught up with Rush frontman Geddy Lee to discuss the band's appeal and what makes them so unique on the music scene. An excerpt from the story is available below.

There is a long list of things that make Rush unique – their decency as human beings, their incredible musicianship, and songwriting ability just to name a few. Or, like Grohl so adequately stated, the fact that they have stayed true to themselves as artists versus chasing commercial mainstream success.

“It’s just the way we work,” noted Lee. “We just do what sounds right to us and hope that someone else likes it. We make our music to make us happy, we’re not sitting down writing songs because we think the audience will like this song. We’re writing songs because we’re getting off on it, and we’re hoping they’ll get off on it too. That’s why our career has always been a wavy line because it’s not programmed, it’s not a master plan that were trying to live out. It’s a natural organic thing that evolves and makes mistakes and moves sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards and sometimes sideways.”

But perhaps, the most refreshing thing about Rush is that 40 plus years in, these men still have a deep dedication to each other and a “Three Musketeers” one for all, all for one mentality not found by many of their counterparts who are often wrecked by in-fighting. If one person doesn’t want to tour or record an album, then Rush simply waits.

“You spend 40 years with the same people and all of our heart and our sweat and our personalities goes into the music that we make,” Lee explained. “It’s also a friendship —a collaborative kind of club that we are doing this and this is our thing, together. It’s connected to the personalities, it’s connected to the human beings. It’s not something anyone can step into and it will be a thing. It is the thing that is dependent on the three people who are in the band, and were one to leave or not want to play anymore, you couldn’t just replace that person with some other person; It’s going to change the chemistry. It’s going to change the dynamics, and as such, it would be a different band.

“Rush as I see it, is as an identifiable living thing dependent and interdependent and connected to the three goofs that are in that band, and that’s how it will remain.”

Go to this location for the complete story.