Songfacts®:

• Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson explained to Guitar Player, April 1986: "There's always one song that you're terrified of doing. You think it's going to be really tough, and 'Marathon' was the one. We wrote it and thought, 'This song is going to be like pulling teeth once we get in the studio.' Of course, we get into the studio and it's a breeze. And a song like "Emotion Detector," which we thought would be a breeze, was the killer. It was very, very difficult to get the mood right. I'm still not really sold on that song. It never ended up sounding the way I had hoped it would. Half of 'Emotion Detector' was done in one pass. Actually, that song had a whole different solo that took quite a bit of work. We left it, went ahead with some other parts, lived with it for 4 or 5 days, and Neil didn't feel quite right about it. He didn't think that it made the proper kind of statement to the song, so we re-examined it and I gave it another whirl. That was tough. It's one thing to rewrite a rhythm guitar part - you've got stuff to lock onto. But it was so hard to divorce what had been in my head as a solo for three months and come up with something that was a totally different feel. But I am satisfied with the results."