Songfacts®:

• Neil Peart (from "Rush Profiled!"): "I think it's part of everyone's experience that a certain record reflects a certain period of their life, and that's a pleasurable scar, you know, there's a mark left on you, a psychological fingerprint left by a very positive experience. And music is an easy one, but it translates to so many other parts of life where it's a given that, for instance, the sense of smell is one of the strongest forces in your memory, where a given smell will suddenly conjure up a whole time of your life, and again, it triggers another scar, it triggers another psychological imprint that was left by a pleasurable thing. So it was just, again, the metaphor of scars and using it to say that, as the song does, that these are positive and negative aspects of life that have both left their mark. Trying to make it universal, it's not autobiographical, and I took a whole autobiographical story of my own and made it one line, basically, but there are other things in there, parts of life that I've responded to in a sense of joy, and in a sense of compassion, and there's the exaltation of walking down a city street and feeling like you're above the pavement, and Christmas in New York is the perfect time to feel that, really, where you just get charged up by the whole energy and the positive feelings of it all."
• Alex Lifeson (Guitar Player, November 1991, on adding guitar effects): "I much prefer to print to tape. On 'Scars,' for instance, I got free rein on all atmospheric guitar stuff. Some producers we worked with in the past would have said, 'No, let's print your guitar perfectly clean and experiment later,' but it's never the same. I say do it and live with it." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington, for above 2