Chiming in as another drummer who studied Neil quite rigorously when I began self-teaching drum kit. I had the 2 VHS set of "A Work In Progress", which came with booklets of his parts written out (not in their entirety, mind you, just bits of each song). I studied that VHS and those booklets SO much that I even eventually wrote out
the whole tablature drum part for "Limbo" for the Rush Tablature Project many many years ago.
Neil's drumming on TFE is definitely challenging in a different way. I think it's something more along the lines that those parts were harder to play but they sounded simple, in contrast to his earlier drum work in the 70s and 80s, where they sounded hard, but were just parts that were fast and fairly simple if you practice enough, start slowly and then bring it up to speed. There are just a lot of rhythmically complex or interesting patterns on TFE that set it apart, drumming wise, than most of Neil's previous work, especially his fills and grooves. The then-new kit layout also opened up some interesting explorations as well for him.
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Regarding HYF being Neil's favorite - I don't think I had heard that before, or if I did, I maybe laughed and shrugged it off, but maybe as I have been going back through the band's catalog chronologically (slowly), along with my complete Live Concert Albums series that I made many years ago, I may discover something new and interesting about HYF when I get around to it. There are some really good songs on there, like "Force Ten" and "Mission", and "Time Stand Still" is a classic (which I heard on the radio the other day while driving a work van!!), but I think it was interesting to note that on the HYF Tour, they began to play less and less of their new material than ever before. Up to the POW Tour, they had played almost every song off their new albums since the beginning - Some early Rush Tour sets I've seen say they played every song, and I don't see why they wouldn't have, same for Fly By Night, though the setlist.fm sets with "Rivendell" seem kind of suspicious. Of course, there's the often contested reliability that they played "The Fountain Of Lamneth", but from 2112 to POW, they played all but one or two songs from every album - "Lessons" and "Tears", "Madrigal", "Different Strings", "Witch Hunt" (it would appear two tours later), "Losing It" (it would appear decades later), and "Emotion Detector" were the only ones from that stretch that were never played. Then came along HYF, where they only made room for six of the ten new songs. I think the album might have fared better with fans had they given the tour a couple more songs to play live, but who knows. And of course, from there on out, up to Snakes & Arrows, they only ever did about half of each new album on that tour, but given their growing catalog and the need for regular staple songs in each set, I don't blame them for having to make sacrifices, like cutting out "Time & Motion" after a few times on the TFE Tour, or having to alternate a couple Vapor Trails songs on that tour rather than playing all of them each night.
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And as for ranking by sector, let's see....
Sector 1 - 2112 = COS > FBN > Rush
Sector 2 - MP = PEW = HEMI = AFTK (I honestly would be VERY hard pressed to rank these, they're all 1a-1d)
Sector 3 - POW > SIG > GUP > HYF
Sector 4 - CP > TFE = Presto > RTB
Sector 5 - CA > VT > S&A
-Marc.
Poll