“Roll The Bones” by Rush

"Roll the Bones" lent its name to Rush's 1991 album and became the record's second single, with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on music and Neil Peart on words. Peart's lyric is a dare to the fence-sitters: life's a crapshoot, so pick up the dice and throw, which is what the slang in the title means. In a 1992 interview he boiled it down further: even if the universe is random and that scares you stiff, you have to gamble anyway, or nothing ever happens.

Then there's the curveball: a rap section, which Peart wrote as a lyrical experiment after soaking up the better rap writers, LL Cool J and Public Enemy among them. The band weighed bringing in a real rapper, or playing it for laughs by hiring Robbie Robertson or even John Cleese.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.