The Neal Morse Band: Enjoying Life's Grand Experiments

If this world had been created by Neal Morse, there’d be no such thing as subtlety. Mountains would be 10 times taller, romantic gestures more grandiose than a billionaire’s cocktail party and movie screens so ginormous they’d render IMAX puny by comparison. Fortunately for lovers of bombastic progressive rock, he is but a mortal man, so instead he channels his widescreen, Technicolor vision into albums like last year’s near two hour concept piece ‘The Similitude Of A Dream’.

The Neal Morse Band are currently touring the UK in support of that opus and Stereoboard spoke to the man himself about crafting a progressive masterpiece from a revered religious text, how it nearly caused him to fall out with Mike Portnoy and why his next live release will somehow manage to eclipse all that’s preceded it.

You were initially reluctant to make another concept album, so what was it about John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress that inspired you to take the plunge again?

I was playing around with some ideas one morning, felt I needed some direction, and remembered that somebody had, either emailed or Facebooked or Tweeted, a suggestion we do a prog concept album based on Pilgrim’s Progress. So I looked up the Sparknotes, because I’d never read it, and was like ‘Ah, well…let’s see. A guy has a dream that he sees somebody in the wilderness with a pack on his back. This is kind of interesting.’ He’s told he needs to leave the City of Destruction and I thought ‘What would that sound like?’ and started to plunk out some ideas.

I shared those with the guys a couple of weeks later and it began to take shape when we started to work on it together. A lot of times, when you’re creating you’re throwing things against the wall and wondering ‘Is this anything? Is this any good?  Is there something here?’ After we worked on it as a band, that’s when I realised there was something there.

For those people who’ve never made a mammoth concept album based around a religious text, where on earth do you begin?

Well it’s very intuitive. It doesn’t necessarily have to make any sense. There’s so many characters in the book that the guy encounters. I’d just sort of thumb through the pages and go ‘Oh, wow, the man in the iron cage. That’s an interesting character. What would that sound like?’ Then, of course, I brought my own experience into it and tried to update it a little bit. So it isn’t a literal adaptation, it’s loosely based. Some of it is pretty direct and some isn’t at all. A lot of the stuff I mention in Breath of Angels, for example, is more of my own experience and imagination about what it would be like to view and then enter the gates of heaven.  

There’s a wondrous array of musical styles and instrumental flavours on the album that both serve the story and typify what an expansive aesthetic you guys possess.

Well, it is very much an exploratory palette we have. I grew up listening to a wide variety of stuff. My dad was a choir director and loved variety. A typical concert that he would put on, that I’d be involved in, would be a classical piece, then spirituals, then some 20th century thing from Japan. Then an Americana piece and another classical piece. So I grew up singing a lot of different kinds of music and to me that was normal. If everything was kind of in the same genre, that was considered a little bit boring. That’s why I was so attracted to progressive rock. All of us in the band, we’re very much in love with the juxtaposition of different styles. The dynamics of it all make each part more special.

The Ways Of A Fool is sublimely melodic and very dynamic.

Most of that was a song Bill Hubauer had written years ago about this foolish guy that put helium balloons on his lounge chair in LA so he could see the fireworks better - by flying up into LAX airspace. We had considered it for ‘The Grand Experiment’, we all liked the music very much and the chorus as well. And then when we weren’t sure where to go, where the worldly wise man enters the story, I don’t know who it was, had the idea to try Bill’s balloon song there and change the lyrics. It worked so well, the feel of it, the whole composition. We wound up inserting the whole big proggy section in the middle, something we worked on together in the room, but it was Bill’s baby really.   

Who wrote the thunderous riff on Man In The Iron Cage and how much fun is it to perform such a powerhouse classic rock song?

Oh, it’s great fun. It’s almost like this album performs itself. It has such great rising and falling built into it that the piece works every time, no matter what mood you’re in, whether it’s a good venue or a bad venue. We are so enjoying playing it live. But The Man In The Iron Cage, I thought it should have some heavy riffs. I had a bunch and just kind of played them into my phone and, as a band, we listened to all those and wound up choosing the main one. That was just a secondary riff in my original thinking, but it came out great.

One of the most interesting and odd songs is The Mask. What can you tell me about that track?

Well, the classical piano thing was something I wrote based on one of the main themes of the album. But then the thing it goes into, the kind of chorus piano with me singing and the sound effects, was a piano riff Bill had been playing around with. When we were writing together he started playing that and I was thinking about the guy entering the valley of humiliation in the book, what that might feel and sound like. So I started singing, just ad-libbing, over him playing that piano riff and that’s how The Mask began.      

The album sounds like a million dollars and many musicians were employed to enhance its huge sonic canvas. How do you achieve that on what must be a comparatively small budget?

Well I have a studio at home, for one thing. And it’s really the miracle of modern technology.  We did the basic tracking here and created stems…here’s a stereo drum track, here’s a stereo guitar track and whatnot. Bill, Eric [Gillette] and I worked on a lot of overdubs and vocals in our own environment with no engineers, so it doesn’t cost anything. That helps a lot. In the old days you had to rent the studio for months and months. And the engineers of course. All the overdubbing, I’ve horn guys I send the tracks to and they put the horns on and send it back. So it’s all just less expensive. And Rich Mouser is such an amazing mixer that he can make it all sound incredible. So we’re really blessed to be able to do what we’re doing at the level that we can.

You made The Neal Morse Band a proper collaborative unit prior to 2015's ‘The Grand Experiment’. How has your music benefitted from that delegation of creativity?

Well I think the proof is on the CD, man. I think the grand experiment has worked out. For me it’s all about the music, not so much about the sales. Sales have been strong and better also, but that’s because people know the music is so strong. It takes it to a different level of performance, a different level of vocal quality. It’s just a different level that we’ve come to by the grace of God.

Eric is a real find. Why was he the guitarist you wanted?

Him bringing his talent to this band, the contribution is incalculable. He’s also an extraordinary keyboardist and composer. He composed all the intro music and that’s pretty amazing too. The guy could be a movie scorer, he could do anything. He’s unreal. He plays drums great. He also brings a lot of heaviness, like many of the heavy riffs on the album were written by him. That’s a great element to bring into the mix, a great ingredient to put in the soup.

You’ve worked with Mike Portnoy on some many different projects – is he your musical soulmate?

Yeah, in a way, we’ve done so many things together. It’s incredible. Who knew? I mean, who would have thought that it would be such a fruitful collaboration? He’s an incredible friend and musician.

What makes Mike such a special musician, because he’s known as one of the world’s greatest drummers but brings so much more to whatever project he’s working on?

He definitely does. Mike, in addition to being an amazing drummer, is also a very capable producer and his mind for arrangements is unbelievable, the way he figures things out, how to put things together. He’s much more musical than anybody would know. He doesn’t know the names of chords and things like that, but he’ll call out chord changes, sing a bass note like ‘No no no we need to go to this place’ and we all figure it out in the room together. But Mike is a driving force also. I’m a little more, sometimes pensive, in the studio and he knows what he wants, knows what he likes, and is very enthusiastic and keeps the train moving at a fast pace, which is a good thing.  

Having said that, I believe the song Slave To Your Mind was recorded during a difficult time for you and Mike in the studio as he was adamant he didn’t want to make a double concept album after Dream Theater had just released one. How did you change his mind?

Well, I don’t know if I really changed his mind. What I did was, when we parted that Monday night in very...it was the most tension we’d ever had together, I just prayed a lot to be honest. I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I thought maybe, we were at such an impasse, this will be the time when we don’t get it done. But I prayed through the night, woke up really early and felt inspired to come in and see if I could write some stuff for the second disc that would be stronger, figure out how to fit it together, write some words that would make it make more sense. I felt if I could bring it to a little bit more of a together kind of place, Mike would see that we should explore it.

I worked on it all morning, from about five until noon.  But when he showed up he was already in a new place. He apologised to everybody, I apologised to him, and we just started working from there. After that, we flew. That was on the Tuesday and by Wednesday at dinnertime we’d sketched out the rest of the album. He finished all his drums by Thursday night. That was when he said ‘Boys, I think we’ve made the album of our careers’. Which was a real jaw dropper after everything we’d been through. But, the way things happened, made it all work together great.   

Your religious beliefs imbue your music with a really uplifting, positive vibe that should appeal to everyone, regardless of what they believe. Is that the effect you want your work to have?

Well yeah, I felt like, particularly with ‘Similitude...’, I wanted people to able to find things they could relate to in it, whatever their walk of life or belief. It’s all an allegory, it’s all a metaphor, the inner journey. So I was trying to make it something people could relate to wherever they are in their walk. That was important to me.

Have you ever been concerned that voicing your beliefs in song may scare people away from your music?

I’ve been concerned, but for me I’ll just pray about it. There’s been lyrics I’ve really prayed about, like ‘Should I say this this way or should I tone it down?’ But most of the time I just follow my heart and say what I feel I really want to say, what I need to say, and just let the chips fall where they may. Whenever you’re creating, or whenever you’re doing anything, you’re always running the risk of people not liking it. You can’t worry about that too much. You have to write from your heart and do what you feel like you’re put here to do.

You’ve just released a huge new live package titled ‘Morsefest 2015’. What can fans expect from it and what will they be treated to that’s different from previous releases?

It’s the ‘Sola Scriptura’ and the ‘?’ album live plus encores, extras and a whole behind the scenes documentary. I think that this is one of the most high quality live packages I’ve ever been involved in. I think when you see it and when your hear it you’ll probably agree. We really just pulled out all the stops with this Morsefest, from the concert, to the filming, to the recording. It’s epic beyond epic.   It’s really, really very, very high quality stuff and I’m really excited about it and hope you all love it.

When you play albums live in their entirety, how important is it to reinvent them for an audience and not just present a note for note reproduction of the records?

Yeah, that was fun. This time I wrote a lot of extra parts. In fact, I wrote a whole choir section in ‘?’ that isn’t on the record. We just did a whole thing, wrote horn parts where there weren’t any and we’ve really take it to a whole different level. There’s orchestral percussion and strings. It was really fun. ‘Sola Scriptura’ and ‘?’ are among some of the fans favourites so I think they’re just gonna love it.  

And what can you say about your next Morsefest as I believe it’s going to be another special occasion?

I’m thrilled about that too. September 1 and 2, here in Nashville, we’re gonna be doing two (albums) plus rarely played epics. That’s Friday night. And then Saturday night we’re going to be doing ‘Similitude Of A Dream’ in its entirety with strings, horns, a choir, percussion and whatever else we can come up with. Special guests and whatnot. It’s going to be quite epic I’m sure.

After two outstanding studio albums, will this line-up of The Neal Morse Band continue to record together?

Oh yes, I’m sure we will. We’re all feeling really good about what’s happening.

And how will you top ‘The Similitude Of A Dream?’

I don’t know. It’s a great adventure. It’s a grand experiment. It’s an amazing journey. I’m beginning to write but I’m not sure where it’s all going.  It’s part of the discovery.

Is it daunting to follow such a highly praised album?

Not really. I always try to write from a free place, put the past in the past and just try to be in the moment. Every album needs to be fresh and in its own moment. We’ll have to see what happens next. I’m sure God has more wonderful things in store.

Neal Morse Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Fri April 07 2017 - GLASGOW O2 ABC Glasgow
Sat April 08 2017 - MANCHESTER O2 Ritz
Sun April 09 2017 - LONDON O2 Academy Islington

Click here to compare & buy Neal Morse Tickets at Stereoboard.com.

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