Rush - Vital Signs
Rush - Vital Signs


Rush - Vital Signs Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Moving Pictures
Released: 1981

Vital Signs Lyrics


Unstable condition
A symptom of life
In mental
And environmental
Change

Atmospheric disturbance
The feverish flux
Of human interface
And interchange

The impulse is pure
Sometimes our circuits get shorted
By external interference

Signals get crossed
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence

A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a mood lifter
Everybody need reverse polarity

Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to deviate
From the norm

An ounce of perception
A pound of obscure
Process information
At half-speed

Pause
Rewind, replay
Warm memory chip
Random sample
Hold the one you need

Leave out the fiction
The fact is
This friction
Will only be worn by persistence

Leave out conditions
Courageous convictions
Will drag the dream into existence

A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a soft filter
Everybody need reverse polarity

Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to elevate
From the norm

Writer/s: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
Publisher: OLE MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Vital Signs
  • Neil Peart (Guitar for the Practicing Musician, 1986): "At the end of an album it's impossible for us to judge which songs will truly be popular and which won't. We're inevitably surprised. And then there are songs like "Vital Signs" from our Moving Pictures album. At the time it was a very transitional song. Everybody had mixed feelings about it, but at the same time it expressed something essential that I wanted to say. That's a song that has a marriage of vocals and lyrics I'm very happy with. But it took our audience a long time to get it, because it was rhythmically very different for us and it demanded the audience to respond in a different rhythmic way. There was no heavy downbeat; it was al counterpoint between upbeat and downbeat, and there was some reflection of reggae influence and a reflection of the more refined areas of new wave music that we had sort of takes under our umbrella and made happen. That song took about three tours to catch on. It was kind of a baby for us. We kept playing it and wouldn't give up. We put it in our encore last tour-putting it in the most exciting part of the set possible-and just demanded that people accept it because we believed in it. I still think that song represents a culmination-the best combination of music, lyrics, rhythm. It opens up so many musical approaches, from being very simplistic and minimal to becoming very overplayed. Everything we wanted in the song is there. So that song was very special to us. But we had to wait. We had to be patient and wait for the audience to understand us." (thanks, Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington)
  • In the Moving Pictures tour book, Peart added: "'Vital Signs' was the ultimate result, eclectic in the extreme, it embraces a wide variety of stylistic influences, ranging from the sixties to the present. Lyrically, it derives from my response to the terminology of 'Technospeak,' the language of electronics and computers, which often seems to parallel the human machine, in the functions and interrelationships they employ. It is interesting, if irrelevant, to speculate as to whether we impose our nature on the machines that we build, or whether they are merely governed by the inscrutable laws of Nature as we. (Perhaps Murphy's Laws?) Never mind!" (thanks, Nathan - Wichititty, KS)
  • Vocalist Geddy Lee recalled to The Plain Dealer newspaper in a 2011 interview: "That was a hoot to write. We wrote it in about 5 minutes in the studio. We just put it together quickly and had a lot of fun doing it. It's still fun to play. It's the quirkier side of Rush's sound, and I think there's always a need for that, to give your sound diversity."