Thanks for sharing this, I'd never heard it before.

Rush is one of those bands I didn't really get into until my late teens, long after they'd been enshrined as rock gods, but now stands as one of my all-time favorites. My dad had a greatest hits CD in his car and when I borrowed his car to go to work I'd jam out "Spirit of Radio" driving way too fast in the middle of the night with my windows down, screaming out the lyrics. Then dad and I got to see them live a year or so after their R30 tour, which was really awesome. Good times!

Fun tidbit about the song - they've originally wanted to track the song in a single take, but then realized they just couldn't do it and recorded it in 3 separate takes. From Geddy Lee in the Guardian interview:

"That was a song where I would have to say our ideas exceeded our ability to play them,” Lee says of the nine-and-a-half-minute, 12-part instrumental suite that set new standards for bands hoping to go widdly woo on their instruments at great length. “We thought: ‘We’re going to write this long piece and then we’ll just record it live off the floor and boom!’ But it was really difficult. It was beyond us.

Another interesting thing is the fact that the song is in fact a re-telling of Alex Lifeson's nightmare dreams in 12 parts, this is from Neil Peart's interview to CBC Music:

This is Alex's brain, and every section of that song is different dreams that Alex would tell us about and we'd be, 'stop, stop.' It was these bizarre dreams that he would insist on telling you every detail about, so it became a joke between Geddy and me. "La Villa Strangiato" means strange city, and there was so much going on in that. There's also a big band section in there, which was absolutely for me because I always wanted to play that approach. And cartoon music. We got in trouble later because we used music from a cartoon from the 1930s.