Roll the Bones

Roll the Bones is the fourteenth studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released in 1991. The album was recorded at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec and at McClear Place in Toronto, Ontario with Rupert Hine returning as producer. 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. The album also achieved an RIAA certification of platinum, the latest Rush album to date to do so. Roll The Bones was remastered and re-released in 2004 as part of the Atlantic Records "Rush Remasters" series, and in 2011, once again remastered (by Kevin Gray) and re-released by Audio Fidelity as a gold CD.
Roll the Bones marks further transition from the band's 1980s style to their sound in the 1990s. The roles of the instruments have generally been reversed; guitar is beginning to creep to the front of the song arrangements, while bursts of keyboard and organ are played in the background. "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, in 1991, losing to Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover". Coincidentally, Eric Johnson went on to provide support for the Roll the Bones tour in fall of 1991. The musical style of Roll the Bones paved the way for the "alternative" style of 1993’s Counterparts.
In the Roll the Bones tourbook of 1991-1992, drummer and lyricist, 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."