Vapor Trails is the seventeenth studio album by the Canadian rock band Rush, released in 2002. The release of Vapor Trails marked the first studio album for the band in six years (since Test for Echo in 1996). Long known for purposeful stylistic changes that defined individual albums as well as delineated the larger-scale phases of their recording career, Vapor Trails brought a shift in many fundamental aspects of the Rush sound as it had evolved over the years. On Vapor Trails there are no keyboards, no traditional guitar solos, and no processed-guitar tones. Instead, Vapor Trails uses a more purified guitar tone, lots of vocal, guitar and even bass overdubs, and an overall darker tone to the music and lyrics. Much of the recordings were from one-off jam sessions and many of the original takes from those sessions were used to construct the songs. Rush made extensive use of computers and music editing software to piece the jam session recordings into songs. Drummer Neil Peart remarked “ Eventually Geddy began to sift through the vast number of jams they had created, finding a verse here, a chorus there, and piecing them together. Often a pattern had only ever been played once in passing, but through the use of computer tools it could be repeated or reworked into a part. Since all the writing, arranging, and recording was done on computer, a lot of time was spent staring at monitors, but most of the time technology was our friend, and helped us to combine spontaneity and cr