10 Terrible Songs By Perfect Rock Bands
6. Fountain of Lamneth - Rush
Even for a genre like prog rock, jumping into a Rush album can be complicated. Neil Peart was always known to be on the verbose side, and a lot of the band’s best work involves heady concepts that tend to go on strange tangents over the course of 9 minutes. That’s fine if it works, but Fountain of Lamneth almost cost the band their record deal.
After their first ambitious song By Tor and the Snow Dog, this is one of the goofiest stories that the band would ever write. Spanning across nearly 20 minutes, the tale here is a man making his life mission about finding this fountain that may grant him enlightenment. We get a whole dissection of this guy trying to find this fountain only to realize that it was just a normal fountain at the end.
Once you hear the end of the song, you can’t help but feel disappointed that all of those 20 minutes was building up to a story about nothing. No fans showed up for this either, which meant Rush had to dig a lot deeper before coming up with 2112. You can’t fault them for their ambition, but if you’re going to make a song that’s 20 minutes, we better get somewhere.