Peart was born on September 12, 1952, to Glen and Betty Peart and lived his early years on his family’s farm in Hagersville, on the outskirts of Hamilton. The first child of four, his brother Danny and sisters Judy and Nancy were born after the family moved to St. Catharines when Peart was two years old. At this time his father became parts manager for Dalziel Equipment, an International Harvester farm machinery dealer. In 1956 the family moved to the Port Dalhousie area of the town. Peart attended Gracefield School and later Lakeport Secondary School, and described his childhood as happy and says he experienced a warm family life. By early adolescence he became interested in music and acquired a transistor radio, which he would use to tune into pop music stations broadcasting from Toronto, Hamilton, Welland, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.

After some discussion between Lee and Lifeson, Peart officially joined the band on July 29, 1974, two weeks before the group’s first US tour. Peart procured a silver Slingerland kit which he played at his first gig with the band, opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in front of over 11,000 people at the Civic Arena, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 14, 1974.

His first recording with the band, 1975’s Fly by Night, was fairly successful, winning the Juno Award for most promising new act, but the follow-up, Caress of Steel, for which the band had high hopes, was greeted with hostility by both fans and critics. In response to this negative reception, most of which was aimed at the B side-spanning epic “The Fountain of Lamneth”, Peart responded by penning “2112” on their next album of the same name in 1976. The album, despite record company indifference, became their breakthrough and gained a following in the United States. The supporting tour culminated in a three-night stand at Massey Hall in Toronto, a venue Peart had dreamed of playing in his days on the Southern Ontario bar circuit and where he was introduced as “The Professor on the drum kit” by Lee.

Peart returned to England for Rush’s Northern European Tour and the band stayed in the United Kingdom to record the next album, 1977’s A Farewell to Kings in Rockfield Studios in Wales. They returned to Rockfield to record the follow-up, Hemispheres, in 1978, which they wrote entirely in the studio. The recording of five studio albums in four years, coupled with as many as 300 gigs a year, convinced the band to take a different approach thereafter. Peart has described his time in the band up to this point as “a dark tunnel”.

The 1980 album Permanent Waves saw Peart cease to use fantasy and mythological themes. 1981’s Moving Pictures showed that Peart was still interested in heroic, mythological figures, but now placed firmly in a modern, realistic context. The song “Limelight” from the same album is an autobiographical account of Peart’s reservations regarding his own popularity and the pressures associated with fame. From Permanent Waves onward, most of Peart’s lyrics began to revolve around social, emotional, and humanitarian issues, usually from an objective standpoint and employing the use of metaphors and symbolic representation.

USA Today’s writers compared him favorably to other top shelf rock drummers. He was “considered one of the best rock drummers of all time, alongside John Bonham of Led Zeppelin; Ringo Starr of The Beatles; Keith Moon of The Who; Ginger Baker of Cream and Stewart Copeland of The Police.” Being “known for his technical proficiency”, the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame inducted him in 1983.

Peart played Zildjian A-series cymbals and Wuhan china cymbals until the early 2000s when he switched to Paragon, a line created for him by Sabian. In concert starting in 1984 on the Grace Under Pressure Tour, Peart used an elaborate 360-degree drum kit that would rotate as he played different sections of the kit.

In 1992, Peart was invited by Buddy Rich’s daughter, Cathy Rich, to play at the Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship Concert in New York City. Peart accepted and performed for the first time with the Buddy Rich Big Band. Peart remarked that he had little time to rehearse, and noted that he was embarrassed to find the band played a different arrangement of the song than the one he had learned. Feeling that his performance left much to be desired, Peart decided to produce and play on two Buddy Rich tribute albums titled Burning for Buddy: A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Rich in 1994 and 1997 in order to regain his aplomb.

For most of his career, Peart had never publicly identified with any political party or organization in Canada or the United States. Even so, his political and philosophical views have often been analyzed through his work with Rush and through other sources. In October 1993, shortly before that year’s Canadian federal election, Peart appeared with then-Liberal Party leader Jean Chrétien in an interview broadcast in Canada on MuchMusic, but stated in that interview that he was an undecided voter.

Peart has often been categorized as an Objectivist and an admirer of Ayn Rand. This is largely based on his work with Rush in the 1970s, particularly the song “Anthem” and the album 2112; the latter specifically credited Rand’s work. However, in his 1994 Rush Backstage Club Newsletter, while contending the “individual is paramount in matters of justice and liberty,” Peart specifically distanced himself from a strictly Objectivist line. In a June 2012 Rolling Stone interview, when asked if Rand’s words still speak to him, Peart replied, “Oh, no. That was forty years ago. But it was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile.” Peart has also subscribed to a personal philosophy that he called “Tryism”, which holds that anything one tries to attain will be attained if one tries hard enough.

Peart’s first book, titled The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, was written in 1996 about a month-long bicycling tour through Cameroon in November 1988. The book details Peart’s travels through towns and villages with four fellow riders. The original had a limited print run, but after the critical and commercial success of Peart’s second book, Masked Rider was re-issued by ECW Press and remains in print.

On August 10, 1997, soon after the conclusion of Rush’s Test for Echo Tour, Peart’s first daughter (and, at the time, his only child) Selena Taylor, 19, was killed in a single-car crash on Highway 401 near the town of Brighton, Ontario. His common-law wife of 23 years, Jacqueline Taylor, succumbed to cancer 10 months later on June 20, 1998. Peart attributes her death to the result of a “broken heart” and called it “a slow suicide by apathy. She just didn’t care.”

Peart was introduced to photographer Carrie Nuttall in Los Angeles by long-time Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan. They married on September 9, 2000. In early 2001, Peart announced to his bandmates that he was ready to return to recording and performing. The product of the band’s return was the 2002 album Vapor Trails. At the start of the ensuing tour in support of the album, it was decided amongst the band members that Peart would not take part in the daily grind of press interviews and “meet and greet” sessions upon their arrival in a new city that typically monopolize a touring band’s daily schedule. Peart has always shied away from these types of in-person encounters, and it was decided that exposing him to a lengthy stream of questions about the tragic events of his life was not necessary.

Although Peart was sometimes assumed to be a “Conservative” or “Republican” rock star, he criticized the US Republican Party by stating that the philosophy of the party is “absolutely opposed to Christ’s teachings.” In 2005, he described himself as a “left-leaning libertarian”, and is often cited as a libertarian celebrity.

In April 2006, Peart took delivery of his third DW set, configured similarly to the R30 set, in a Tobacco Sunburst finish over curly maple exterior ply, with chrome hardware. He referred to this set, which he used primarily in Los Angeles, as the “West Coast kit”. Besides using it on recordings with Vertical Horizon, he played it while composing parts for Rush’s album, Snakes & Arrows. It featured a custom 23-inch bass drum; all other sizes remained the same as the R30 kit.

Three decades after Peart joined Rush, the band found itself on its 30th anniversary tour. Released in September 2006, Roadshow: Landscape with Drums – A Concert Tour by Motorcycle details the tour both from behind Neil’s drumkit and on his BMW R1150GS and R1200GS motorcycles.

In early 2007, Peart and Cathy Rich again began discussing yet another Buddy tribute concert. At the recommendation of bassist Jeff Berlin, Peart decided to once again augment his swing style with formal drum lessons, this time under the tutelage of another pupil of Freddie Gruber, Peter Erskine, himself an instructor of Steve Smith. On October 18, 2008, Peart once again performed at the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The concert has since been released on DVD.

On March 20, 2007 Peart revealed that Drum Workshop prepared a new set of red-painted DW maple shells with black hardware and gold “Snakes & Arrows” logos for him to play on the Snakes & Arrows Tour.

In 2007, Peart was ranked No. 2 (after Sting) on the now defunct magazine Blender’s list of “worst lyricists in rock”. In contrast, Allmusic called him “one of rock’s most accomplished lyricists”.

Peart had a brief cameo in the 2007 film Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, in which samples of his drumming were played.

Peart also had a brief cameo in the 2008 film Adventures of Power and in the DVD extra does a drum-off competition.

Peart appeared in concert with Rush in the 2009 film I Love You, Man, as well as a Funny or Die web short in which the film’s main characters sneak into the band’s dressing room.

Peart’s next book, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time, was published by ECW Press in May 2011. This book, which he worked on for two years, is formed around his traveling in North and South America. It tells how he found in a Brazilian town a unique combination of West African and Brazilian music. In 2014, a follow-up book, Far and Near: On Days like These, was published by ECW. It covers travels in North America and Europe. Another book, Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me!, was published in 2016 and is based on his travels between stops on the R40 Live Tour of 2015.

In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Peart stated that he saw the US Democratic Party as the lesser evil: “For a person of my sensibility, you’re only left with the Democratic party.”

Peart worked with science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson to develop a novelization of Rush’s 2012 album Clockwork Angels; the book was published by ECW Press. The two collaborated again on a loose sequel, Clockwork Lives, published in 2015. Snippets of the band’s lyrics can be found throughout both stories.

Peart authored seven non-fiction books, the latest released in September 2016.

Peart had been suffering from chronic tendinitis and shoulder problems. In January 2018, Alex Lifeson confirmed that Rush is “basically done”. Peart remained friends with his former bandmates.

Peart died from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, on January 7, 2020, in Santa Monica, California. He had been diagnosed three and a half years earlier, and the illness was a closely guarded secret in Peart’s inner circle until his death. His family made the announcement on January 10.