Limelight

R.I.P. Professor Peart. You are an amazing person.

I always think about the music of language when I think about Rush. The words are (at least initially) driving the rhythms. This is why the bar line gets shifted around so much, and why the songs are typically in odd meters; Language is in odd meters, or at least with a roving bar line which serves to add coherence by placing certain syllables on upbeats or downbeats. When you shift them out of their natural position it sounds odd. (e.g. how Lennon sang  "imagine all the peo-PLE).

Peart describes the feedback loop in the creative process of marrying words to music.

Seldom, except in the art-song genre, can a poem be set to music as-is. There are always going to be words and phrases that have to surrender to the music. Rush always finessed that boundary between music and language in a very unique way. There is a winnowing process of navigating between what is both meaningful and singable that is very satisfying once you've resolved it.

In their most popular hits (Limelight, Spirit of the Radio, Tom Sawyer), the words seem to fit more naturally. In Limelight, the riff has the focus. There's also a gorgeous meter change to 3/4 (or 6/8), then later used for the solo. The words get wrapped nicely into the music such a way that flows well and has a deep personal meaning that also has a universal resonance in a time when privacy is even more precious than when he wrote the words circa 1980.

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Linguistically, the song has a "Peo-PLE" word:

Geddy sings the phrase "caught in the camera eye" on an upbeat ("caught-IN"). When we speak the phrase, "caught" is on a downbeat".  This sounds like it is a mutual interpretation of syllabic stress, perhaps driven by a flam/paradiddle at the moment, and a good example of the fine interplay between syllabic stress and anacruses.