Rush Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
120 free Rush trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rush trivia for people who know a Hentor Sportscaster from a Rickenbacker. This quiz covers the whole run of Canada's greatest power trio: the Willowdale church-basement gig, the Cleveland DJ who broke "Working Man", the do-or-die gamble of 2112, the Rockfield years, the synth era, the long hiatus and comeback, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Fifty Something reunion tour with Anika Nilles behind the kit. You'll get questions on Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart as people, on the stories behind the songs (a Road & Track short story, a Coleridge poem, an Arctic radar line, an airport code), on Hugh Syme's album covers, on chart facts most fans get wrong, and on the books, side projects and cameos. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who owns Moving Pictures, a third are for regular listeners, and the rest are for people who can name the studio in Wales and the composer behind "Monsters!". Every answer is checked against the band's and albums' reference pages.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Rush formed in 1968 in which Canadian city?
Toronto
Toronto was home turf, and its bars opened to the teenage trio in 1971, when Ontario lowered its drinking age from 21 to 18 and a high-school act could finally play clubs.
Q 02Which 1981 Rush song, co-written with Max Webster lyricist Pye Dubois, opens Moving Pictures?
Tom Sawyer
Tom Sawyer began as a Pye Dubois lyric called "Louis the Warrior", a portrait of a modern-day rebel that Peart reworked by adding his own theme of reconciling the boy and the man in himself.
Q 03The instrumental "YYZ" takes its title from what?
An airport code
An airport code: YYZ identifies Pearson International, and the opening riff taps out those three letters in Morse code, the same signal the airport's radio beacon sends to pilots.
Q 04What was Neil Peart's nickname within the band?
The Professor
The Professor was no tribute to his reading, by Peart's own account: his bandmates were simply comparing his manner to the character of that name on the sitcom Gilligan's Island.
Q 05In the song series "Cygnus X-1", what kind of object does the explorer aboard the Rocinante fly into?
A black hole
A black hole swallows the Rocinante, which shares its name with Don Quixote's horse, and the lyric sheet ends "to be continued": the explorer returns a year later on Hemispheres.
Q 06Which honour did the three members of Rush receive together in 1996?
Order of Canada
Order of Canada: all three were made Officers, and their citation credits them with raising over a million dollars for food banks and the United Way.
Q 07Geddy Lee is famous for his devotion to which sport?
Baseball
Baseball is his other obsession: Lee sang "O Canada" at the 1993 All-Star Game and later gave nearly 200 autographed balls from his collection to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
Q 08In the story of the "2112" suite, the priests of the Temples of Syrinx take their orders from what?
Banks of computers
Banks of computers plan every part of life for the priests, so when the hero plays them the guitar he found in a cave, they destroy it and call music a waste of time.
Q 09"Rivendell", the ballad on Fly by Night, takes its name from the world of which author?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien's elven refuge named the ballad, but the album's other fantasy epic had humbler roots: By-Tor and the Snow Dog were nicknames for their manager's two dogs.
Q 10What is the name of the 2026-27 reunion tour Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced in October 2025?
Fifty Something
Fifty Something marks 50-plus years of Rush music and honours Neil Peart; planned for a handful of North American cities, it grew with demand until South American and European dates were added for 2027.
Q 11Neil Peart died in January 2020 after a three-and-a-half-year battle with what?
Brain cancer
Brain cancer, a glioblastoma, was a diagnosis Peart fought so quietly that it stayed a closely guarded secret within his inner circle until the news of his death.
Q 12Peart's lyrics for "Subdivisions" describe growing up where?
The suburbs
The suburbs raised all three members, and Peart called the song an exploration of the background from which the band, and probably most of its audience, had sprung.
Q 13Peart credited which writer in the liner notes of 2112, a nod to her novella Anthem?
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand's credit had a cost: NME writer Barry Miles branded the band fascists over it, a charge that stung Lee most of all; he called the piece an anti-totalitarian story.
Q 21Aimee Mann sang guest vocals on which Rush single?
Time Stand Still
Time Stand Still had a high chorus part that Lee sang first and judged wrong for his voice, so the band went looking for a female singer and brought in Mann, then fronting 'Til Tuesday.
Q 22As of 2025, which 1982 single is Rush's only US Top 40 hit?
New World Man
New World Man was an afterthought, written last and fastest because one side of the album had about four minutes to spare; it then reached No. 21 in the US and topped the Canadian chart.
Q 23Neil Peart played his first Rush concert in August 1974 at the Civic Arena in which Pennsylvania city?
Pittsburgh
Q 14Alex Lifeson's whole Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech was which word, repeated over and over?
Blah
Blah, delivered in every tone of voice, was all Lifeson said; his bandmates were not in on the joke, and he recalled that they wanted to kill him afterwards.
Q 15"Limelight" borrows the line about all of us being "merely players" from which Shakespeare play?
As You Like It
As You Like It supplied the image of players on a stage, which Peart turned into a song about his own struggle with fame, autograph seekers and a sudden loss of privacy.
Q 16Which Rush album cover shows a Dalmatian sniffing a red fire hydrant?
Signals
Signals needed a Dalmatian that would sniff on command, so the photographer kept hiding dog biscuits under a rented hydrant on a strip of AstroTurf laid across her studio roof.
Q 17The black-and-white cover of Presto shows a hillside overrun by hundreds of which animals?
Rabbits
Rabbits roam the hill beneath a levitating magician's hat. Lifeson said the band feared the idea could look really stupid, then laughed hysterically at the finished design and called it perfect.
Q 18The Moving Pictures cover, with its movers carrying paintings, was photographed outside which building?
Queen's Park
Queen's Park, home of Ontario's legislature, staged a three-way pun: movers carrying pictures, onlookers moved to tears by them and, on the back cover, a film crew shooting a moving picture.
Q 19"The Trees" tells of a forest dispute between which two kinds of tree?
Maples and oaks
Maples and oaks began as a flash of an image: Peart said in 1980 that he saw a cartoon picture of trees "carrying on like fools" and wondered what would happen if trees acted like people.
Q 20Which eleven-minute Rush epic was inspired by Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan"?
Xanadu
Xanadu went down in one complete take: after a partial run-through to set levels, the band played all eleven minutes from top to bottom, to the shock of the studio's engineer.
Pittsburgh saw his debut before more than 11,000 people, about two weeks after he joined: the newcomer who had turned up to audition in shorts had lately been selling tractor parts.
Q 24Donna Halper broke Rush in the US by putting "Working Man" on the air at WMMS in which city?
Cleveland
Cleveland listeners flooded the station with calls, many taking the song for new Led Zeppelin, and the box of import copies sent down to a local record shop sold out within days.
Q 25Which drummer co-founded Rush and played on only one of their albums, the 1974 debut?
John Rutsey
John Rutsey was meant to write the debut's lyrics as well, but he tore up the words he had written and never handed them in, so the album was recorded without them.
Q 26Who suggested the name "Rush" for the band's first gig?
The drummer's brother
The drummer's brother Bill offered it as the trio got ready for a paying gig in a church basement; Lifeson recalls him saying they needed something short and to the point, with energy to it.
Q 27Rockfield Studios, where Rush recorded A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres, is in which country?
Wales
Wales gave them a farm studio with a cobbled courtyard, so the band set up microphones outdoors: the birdsong at the start of A Farewell to Kings is the real thing.
Q 28Rush recorded Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures at a residential studio in the mountains of which province?
Quebec
Quebec's Laurentian Mountains hid Le Studio, built so that artists could live where they recorded; left to fall into disrepair, it burned in 2017 in a fire that investigators treated as suspicious.
Q 29The album title Grace Under Pressure echoes which American novelist's famous definition of courage?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway's phrase suited an album made under strain: the producer the band had lined up backed out two weeks before work was due to start, leaving them to scramble for a replacement.
Q 30The title track of Roll the Bones surprised fans with what kind of section?
A rap
A rap it was, voiced by Lee with his pitch dropped drastically; the band had sounded out Robbie Robertson for the part and even toyed with a joke version by John Cleese.