This Day in Music History: Rush/Roll the Bones

Roll the Bones is the 14th studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released on this day in 1991. The album won the 1992 Juno Award for best album cover design. Roll the Bones became Rush's first US Top 5 album since 1981's Moving Pictures, peaking at #3 on the Billboard 200. It also achieved a certification of platinum, the latest Rush album to date to do so.

"Dreamline" and "Roll the Bones" were popular radio staples of the early 90s, with the former reaching #1 on the Album Rock Tracks chart, while "Where's My Thing?" became the band's third instrumental and was their second song to be nominated for a Grammy.

"Bones" is a slang term for dice. In the Roll the Bones tourbook of 1991-92, Neil Peart described both the mindset of the lyrics written for not only the title track, but also the album:

"No matter what kind of song you choose to play, you’re betting your life on it, for good or ill, and what you believe is what you are... No one can ever be sure, in this best of all possible random universes. That's why the essence of these songs is: if there's a chance, you might as well take it. So what if some parts of life are a crap shoot? Get out there and shoot the crap. A random universe doesn't have to be futile; we can change the odds, load the dice, and roll again…. For anyone who hasn't seen Groucho Marx's game show You Bet Your Life, I mean that no one but Groucho knows the secret word, and one guess is as good as another... Anything can happen. That is called fate."

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