Found Link: Neil Peart says Rush may abandon the 'album', but might follow Porcupine Tree and write longer material

Well well well. When I posted previously that Rush's drummer Neil Peart was saying Rush might abandon the album format, it was assumed that meant that they might become a 'pop-single' band. That assumption, it would seem, was a bit presumptuous. According to an interview in the Belleville Intelligencer, Peart says that after seeing Porcupine Tree playing all 55-minutes of The Incident in concert, he understands that just because the physical medium may be irrelevant in a digital world, it doesn't mean that writing extended musical excursions is automatically impossible. The quote goes as follows:

I went to see a band called Porcupine Tree not long ago. And I was talking with (singer-guitarist) Steven Wilson. They just put out a 55- minute piece. That's a finger to the whole iTunes shuffle thing, and he intended it as such. And I thought, 'Yeah, that's another way of rebelling against it -- by just saying no.' There's too much lost in giving up the integrity of an album -- what it represents to you as a musician, and as a human being, for that matter. So I like that approach. That's very possible for a band like us. So there are no limitations; we might go big or we might go small.

 This makes me very happy. Steven Wilson is a guy that clearly understands the power of the extended musical journey. It's almost ironic that after being influenced by Rush's albums of the past, he now is having an influence on their future songwriting. What goes around comes around.

Rush Blog - Rush is a Band Blog: New Neil Peart interview with the Belleville Intelligencer