10 Songs That Are Impossible To Understand
7. Fountain of Lamneth - Rush
Sometimes it feels like you need to write an entire grad thesis to actually fully comprehend Rush's lyrics. As soon as you got a whiff of something off of Fly By Night, you can tell that the writing of Neil Peart was going to be a lot more intellectually sophisticated than your KISS's and Aerosmiths of the world. It was smart, it was complicated...and sometimes it would disappear up its own ass like on the Fountain of Lamneth.
Taken from their first genuinely weird album Caress of Steel, this one song alone almost killed the band for being way too complicated for its own good. While already being way too long by taking up an entire side of the record, this song is either really cerebral or really dumb depending on how you choose to look at Neil's words.
On the surface, the whole song seems to be about one man's journey to find this proverbial fountain, only to have the entire song amount to him finally finding the fountain and seeing how meaningless the whole thing is. If anything, the entire experience almost feels like Neil is trolling you when our protagonist says that the journey is pointless. Clearly it means something though, so why did you even bother sending me on this 20 minute odyssey?