“Xanadu” by Rush

Rush make you sit through a full five minutes of instrumental passage before anyone sings on "Xanadu", the eleven-minute epic from 1977's A Farewell to Kings. When Geddy Lee finally steps up, he's delivering Neil Peart's tale, drawn from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan": a seeker hunts down Xanadu, a mythical place that can make him immortal, gets his wish, and a thousand years on finds himself marooned there with nothing but eternity.

It's also the first Rush song where synthesizers carry real weight, and the band's palette swells to match. Lee adds Minimoog and bass pedals to his bass, Alex Lifeson moves between electric, acoustic, classical and 12-string guitars, and Peart rings tubular bells, temple blocks, bell tree, wind chime, vibraslap and cowbell around his drums. Terry Brown produced and mixed it.

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