Neil has talked a few times about “Telescope Peak,” a set of lyrics he wrote while Rush was recording Vapor Trails after the band’s five–year hiatus. The lyrics are about a climb he took to a mountain peak of that name in Death Valley, Calif., during his Ghost Rider days but they didn’t work for Geddy and Alex and were never turned into a song, although lines from the lyrics were folded into two of the songs on the album. From the “lowest low to the highest high” made it into “Ghost Rider” and you “can’t tell yourself how to feel” made it into “How It is.”

“The words still ‘sing’ to me,” Neil says in his latest blog post, called “Telescope Peak Revisited.”

The lyrics are about that pivot point in 1999 when the trek up to Telescope Peak helps him to finally put the “bad old life” behind…