Credit: Far Out / RUSH
Fri 7 August 2026 20:30, UK
If you’re in need of some artistic inspiration, a reach into Homer’s 8th-century BC epic, The Odyssey, is as good a place as any to stir those creative juices, whether you’re the world’s biggest Canadian power-trio or otherwise.
And it is epic. At over 12,000 lines long, the Greek poem stands as a cornerstone of the Western literary tradition that cemented archetypal characters and themes to be plundered for centuries of future artists and storytellers.
An adventure tale with a sharp political dimension, the heroic king of Ithaca, Odysseus, or Ulysses in the Latin tongue, returns to the city after the decade-long Trojan War in Troy after spending an extra ten years facing off all manner of peril and monstrous danger and standing as the only survivor of his shipmates. During his lengthy absence, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus have to deal with the many suitors eager to claim the throne.
It’s all universal stuff that expertly wanders the human condition as all enduring stories should: loyalty, retribution, Odysseus’ wits and cunning to escape danger, and the scenes of political manoeuvring have continued to spark fascination, no less than in today’s day and age, with Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood adaptation.
Naturally, rock and pop riffed through the Odyssey’s ancient manuscript to glean its eternal profundity, from Cream’s bluesy ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysses’ jam, making reference to the perilous sirens, or the Scylla and Charybdis sea monsters that plague the weary sailors, rearing both heads on The Police’s ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’.
With a love of mythos and the literary canon, prog rock heavyweights Rush made sure to smatter 1980’s ‘Freewill’ with some Homeric nods on their exploration of unwavering self-determinism.
The second song on Permanent Waves, the taut rock stomper, flashes drummer and singer-songwriter Neal Peart’s libertarian sympathies as well as warding off superstitious notions of divine fate, for a wholly secular affirmation of Man’s agency, all scored by bassist and frontman Geddy Lee’s piercing vocals and one of the hardest guitar solos in the entire Rush oeuvre courtesy of Alex Lifeson’s fretwork.
Further reading: From The Vault
Amid such ardent self-determination, Peart drops the curious line: “The cards were stacked against them / They weren’t born in Lotus land.”
In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men sail to a strange island populated by the ‘lotus eaters’, a community of people seemingly stuck in a stasis of passive apathy due to the lotuses’ opiate properties when consumed. Soon, all the crewmembers become similarly hooked on the plant and begin to forget about their duties, forcing Odysseus to tie the addicted men under the ships’ benches to thwart escape.
With such a line, Peart warns of the hidden dangers that lurk in Lotusland’s seeming utopia, where personal responsibility is quashed in favour of suspended liberty. ‘Freewill’ also dangles the blissful island as a metaphor for victimhood or hopeless fatalism, where not having been born into luxury stands as an excuse for one’s own inaction. Is this all just fundamentally bootstraps rhetoric? While many can fall into the pitfalls of resigned futility, perhaps such stoic navel-gazing can render one blind to systemic failures like a wooden stake in Polyphemus’ single eye.
