The call came through a text. Rush bass tech Scully — who had previously worked as Jeff Beck‘s guitar tech and had seen Anika Nilles up close on that tour — reached out with two words: “I have to call you. It’s urgent.”
Nilles assumed something had gone wrong with someone from the Beck crew. It hadn’t. Scully had been talking to Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, and they had someone in mind. The Zoom call with Lee and Lifeson that followed was, in her words, surreal. “It was even crazier after I saw those two faces on my screen as we had this Zoom meeting, the first time I really talked to Geddy and Alex. Unreal,” she told Rick Beato in a recent interview.
Shortly after, she was deep in the Rush rabbit hole — music, interviews, live footage, anything she could find online. “I was just like diving directly into the Rush rabbit hole and just listening to everything I could catch,” she said. “The music, videos, interviews, live shows, everything you can find online, basically, to just get to know the songs a bit better.”
The first rehearsal centered on six or seven songs, which gave her something to focus on within a catalog that could otherwise swallow you whole. The tour launched this past Sunday to what Beato described as an incredible success.
Stepping into the seat occupied for decades by Neil Peart is not a small thing, but Nilles found an unexpected pressure valve in the fact that Lee and Lifeson were also shaking off rust. The band had not played together in nearly 10 years.
“As a trio, we had to find a way to come together,” she said. “It’s one thing when you come into a band, and everyone knows everything, and it’s just playing it smooth because they’re doing it every day on stage, and you’re the one who’s the newbie who has to adjust. It didn’t feel like that.” Having Lee and Lifeson essentially rediscover songs alongside her leveled the playing field in a way she didn’t expect. “That definitely took the pressure a little bit off my shoulders.”
Learning the material itself required a completely different approach than anything in her preparation playbook. Nilles typically builds a chart, listens, reads, and plays. That method broke down almost immediately with Rush‘s catalog.
“I figured with this, it doesn’t work. Sometimes you cannot really write it out because a lot of it is also kind of a feeling,” she said. “Technically, you can write it out, but I would have spent so much time with just that.” Instead, she broke things into chunks and learned them step by step. “Just memorizing all the parts is one thing. Learning the feeling is a different thing.”
And then there are the fills… the ones every Rush fan has been air-drumming since the 1970s. Nilles is aware of what awaits her every night. “Everybody knows those fills,” she said, with a laugh. “I do know them, too, now. But if they come out like that or not — we will see when the time comes.”
The kit she debuted on opening night was brand new — a Bubinga setup she and her tech spent four to five hours dialing in the day before the show. The tom configuration runs 12, 13, 16, and 18, a more conventional layout than she typically prefers, but one dictated by the melodic demands of Rush‘s drum parts. “In my own kit, I preferred the weird setting,” she said. “But here, because of all the melodies in the songs, it has to be that melody. So I just make it easier for myself.”
Her tuning philosophy leans low and dry. “My tuning is usually very low. The batter heads are really loose — I don’t like it if there’s too much rebound,” she said. She pulls pitch from the resonant heads rather than the batter side, tuning the bottom heads higher to generate tone. For the Rush shows, she has opened things up slightly to let the drums breathe in larger spaces.
She chose Bubinga specifically for the scale of the venues, having used the same kit on the Beck tour. “For this kind of huge stages and big venues, the Bubinga works really well,” she said. “It’s not my go-to choice when I play in smaller venues or clubs because then it’s too boomy. But for this kind of stage, it’s just the perfect wood.” The cymbals are all Meinl, with a shift toward brighter, more open, brilliant finishes — and a custom ride and hi-hat developed specifically to sit inside Rush‘s sonic landscape. “We developed a sound which is more adjusted to Rush‘s drum sound,” she said.
Nilles grew up in rural Bavaria, the daughter of an amateur drummer who rehearsed regularly in the family basement. She gravitated to the kit early, though keyboards remained a parallel obsession. Her father taught her the basics before enrolling her in a music school — he was self-taught and wanted her to learn properly from the start. Her earliest ensemble experience came through a traditional brass orchestra, which is about as far from Rush as it gets.
Her path to professional drumming was indirect. Her parents pushed for something more stable first, and she obliged — studying social education before eventually making the turn to music full-time. The detour was not wasted. “I learned so much in communicating with other people in my social education study. That’s really helpful for bands as well,” she said. And there was a practical upside to drawing a paycheck first. “When you earn money, that’s a cool thing — you can buy a lot of drum gear.”
Her primary musical influence is Toto, specifically the drumming, which she studied in genuine depth as a teenager in a way she had not approached any other music before. “I would say that’s my strongest influence, actually,” she said. Before Toto, music was something she enjoyed without dissecting. “I didn’t care who was playing the drums. It didn’t go into detail. I was just having fun along with the music. But with Toto, it was different.”
The fluidity that drew Lee and Lifeson‘s attention is something Nilles worked hard to develop, and it came from a specific place. A record company executive caught one of her shows at around 17 and told her she started strong but lost energy by the end of the night. It stuck. “I really figured out that I have to work on my technique,” she said. “All the fluidity comes from practicing a lot of technique. I don’t have the muscle power of the guys — I’m shaped differently with my body. So I have to compensate a lot with technique.” That became her primary practice focus for years, well beyond the odd-meter workouts that might be more expected from a drummer in her lane. “My focus was a lot on technique to handle concerts, be stable with everything you have to do during a concert.”
Preparation for the tour has also involved gradually shifting rehearsal times later into the night to simulate show conditions, a detail Lifeson had mentioned to Beato separately. “There’s no nine o’clock sleep time anymore,” Nilles said. “We just shift the time back and back and back until we really rehearse at the time when we’re hitting the stage, because that does something to you. You have to be energized and keep the power at the time when you actually feel tired, maybe, especially with jet lag.” She has also been hitting the gym regularly to maintain stamina through what is shaping up to be a major run.
The tour is underway. For Rush fans who have spent five years wondering whether Lee and Lifeson would ever share a stage again, Sunday’s debut answered the question. For Nilles, the air drumming starts now.
