10 Hard Rock Songs That Are Impossible To Understand
6. The Necromancer - Rush
After adding Neil Peart to the group, Rush had really started to hone in on their own sound. Compared to the other bluesy rock acts they were aping in the early days, Fly By Night saw them getting a lot weirder with different time signatures, forming the foundation for what prog rock would become later down the line. Once they got that out of their system though, it was time to get super weird.
On the surface, most of Caress of Steel is weird as hell from the beginning, but the Necromancer occupies a completely different sonic space. Though thousands of great rock songs have been written about the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, this song is an absolute lost cause when trying to decipher. As the story goes, this song takes place in Middle Earth with the guys in the band being transported into the shire and getting threatened by Sauron in the process.
That's not jumping off the deep end though, with By Tor (a character from a completely different Rush song) showing up to fend off the musicians as they make their way out of danger and live peacefully in the countryside. Despite the best of intentions when writing a story, this conceptual piece of rock art is the stuff of legends only if you're super-into Lord of the Rings fan fiction.