Faithless: Background

“‘Faithless’ is a song about belief systems, about what it takes to get through the day. And it’s a personal statement from Neil in that sense. . . If you look at the chorus, which for me is the most important part of the song, it talks about life. it talks about life when you’re not a very religious person, you’re not a church goer, when you’re just a person. You can call it being an atheist, you can call it whatever you want to call it, but there are many people who don’t identify with a practice of a particular religion. There are many people who find their own road, find their own spirituality in themselves, and find things to believe in that relate to the way they live. And that’s what the song is really about. You know, believing in hope, believing in love: those are two things you can count on believing in, and there aren’t many things you can count on in this world. Others find it great comfort to find religion and get their strength from that, and that’s fine. And many people don’t. I think the song is about those that don’t.”—Geddy in The Game of Snakes and Arrows, Snakes and Arrows DVD

“The song ‘Faithless’ is one of the ones that came out of a lot of the thinking I did during the writing of Roadshow [Neil’s book about traveling the 30th anniversary tour on motorcycle] and after being exposed to so much of the evangelical Christianity of the southern and central United States, after traveling through all the back roads and the small towns of it, on my motorcycle and just trying to grapple with that and deal with it and come to some kind of terms with it, I guess you’d say. It seemed almost too overwhelming to protest against and to fight and make enemies over it, too. That was a big part of it. And I came down to grappling with what you need this for. To me there were two kinds of faith: a good kind that could be protective and help people, and a bad kind that was militant and you wanted to kill people. In the song, I wanted to express, first of all, that you don’t need that kind of faith to have a moral belief and to have, as I describe it, a moral compass and a spirit level—those were the two metaphors I looked at there. I thought, well, I have those sorts of things: I have a strong sense of right and wrong and a sense of compassion and a sense of charity, and all those weren’t contingent on being punished for them or being rewarded for them.”—Neil in The Game of Snakes and Arrows, Snakes and Arrows DVD

More about “Faithless”

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