Anika Nilles | Modern Drummer cover story

Anika Nilles — the German drummer who has been playing Neil Peart’s parts since Rush came back this summer — has the cover of Modern Drummer’s September issue.

Fourteen pages, plus an hour-long video interview alongside it. None of the underlying facts are new — what is new is her talking about the job at length, and that turns out to be worth an hour.

What is in it

David Frangioni filmed the interview in July, the day after a Rush show in Chicago — so she is talking with the gig still ringing in her ears. It runs through the route that took her to Rush, how she prepares for a show, her creative process and her gear choices.

The bit that stuck with us

Asked which Rush song was hardest to learn, she named “Xanadu” — and the reason is not the chops.

It is that the song is stop-start and full of time-signature changes, and the recordings only tell you half of it. She worked through several live versions to unpick which parts were fixed and which the band were inventing on the night, especially in the intro.

That rarely gets said out loud. Learning the record is the easy half. Working out what a band does with a song after fifty years of playing it — the bits nobody wrote down — is the hard half.

Where to watch it

Both are on Modern Drummer’s site. It is their exclusive, so go and watch it rather than settle for our summary. Their whole back catalogue went online last month too, if it sends you down a rabbit hole.

Final thoughts

This is not breaking news and we will not pretend otherwise — the tour started in June and the TAMA signature snare landed in August.

But a fourteen-page sit-down with the drummer holding down the hardest gig in rock does not come round often, and this one is unusually honest about the homework involved.

For the wider picture, our Anika Nilles feature covers the solo records and the Jeff Beck years, and the Toronto reviews are what people in the room made of her.