There is a distinct, slightly embarrassing irony in realizing you’ve overlooked a masterpiece for over three decades.

When Counterparts dropped back in the autumn of 1993, I had the cassette and loved it. Recently, I've been watching a video from the Los Angeles first four opening shows of the Rush 2026 50th Year Tour, and seeing them play "Animate" prompted me to queue up the album for a fresh listen. Like most fans, I was immediately recaptured by that heavy, driven opening groove, along with my personal favorite, "Cold Fire." They had always been my go-to tracks, the definitive statement of that era of the band. For years—decades, indeed—that album sat in my collection, entirely accessible, its contours familiar, or so I thought.

Then, just recently, a track I had bypassed for thirty-three years finally caught my ear. Really caught it.

I was crossing the Purple People Bridge, the expanse between home, Newport, and the city opening up around me, when the track queued up on my phone. There is something about that transition—moving from the familiar into the broader, busier world—that makes you hyper-receptive to the truth. As I jogged, Neil Peart's words suddenly broke through the noise, and for the first time, I actually listened.

The song is "Everyday Glory."

The Micro and the Macro

If you look at the lyrics on the page, they are devastatingly heavy. The song opens in the micro—the raw, intimate trauma of a child hiding in a room where "Mama says some ugly words / Daddy pounds the wall." It doesn’t sugarcoat the cycle of domestic dysfunction which is unfortunately common and happens everyday or what the song calls "everyday shame."

But then, the perspective shifts from a broken home to a broken society, panning the camera out to the macro:

In the city where nobody smiles
And nobody dreams
In the city where desperation
Drives the bored to extremes...

It is a stark portrait of a world losing its grip on empathy. And that is exactly why these lyrics feel so piercingly timely in our current environment.

A Spark of Decency in a Starless Night

We are living through a cultural and political moment defined by friction. Turn on the news, scroll through social media, or just listen to how people talk to one another across political divides, and you can feel the exhaustion. It is an era of big, loud, sweeping proclamations, where the "everyday promise" of regular human connection feels like it's constantly being "shot down in flames."

In the midst of that weariness, "Everyday Glory" offers a completely different definition of strength. It doesn't look to grand political movements or loud leaders to save the day. Instead, it places the responsibility entirely on us, in the small, quiet choices we make in our daily lives:

If the future's looking dark
We're the ones who have to shine
If there's no one in control
We're the ones who draw the line

It turns the word "everyday"—which usually implies the mundane, the routine, or the boring—into something heroic. Rising from the ashes of our current cultural moment doesn't require a miracle; it requires ordinary people deciding to be "just one spark of decency against a starless night."

The Defiance of Trying

There is a fierce, quiet defiance in the final bridge: "Though we live in trying times / We're the ones who have to try."

It’s a reminder that when the macro-environment around us feels chaotic and out of control, our real power belongs in the micro—in how we treat each other, how we protect our dignity, and how we refuse to let the bitterness of the world dictate our own character.

I might be thirty-odd years late to the party on this specific track, but I think I stumbled into it exactly when I was supposed to. "Animate" might have been the song of my youth, but "Everyday Glory" is the song I need right now.