You cannot discuss modern prog-rock without mentioning the importance of the Neal Morse Band (NMB). The band spent most of 2022 on the road supporting their incredible 2021 release Innocence & Danger. The band is about to release an epic live record called An Evening of Innocence & Danger: Live in Hamburg and keyboardist/vocalist Bill Hubauer took some time to discuss it.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Bill Hubauer –
On how the Hamburg show was picked for the live record – Well, actually, I don’t think we had any plans to release anything. Typically, we do the whole DVD live album thing, but we do have the ability to multi-track the shows. So we were recording the shows, some of them, not all of them, but we recorded a number of them just to have. I think the idea to release it came a bit later, but it was a deliberate decision not to film it. I can’t remember how the decision came apart, maybe even the label asked us if we wanted to have anything to release. I really don’t know from a technical standpoint, maybe there were…I don’t know if somebody sat and checked out the different audio files to see which ones have the most potential sonically. I do know that’s a special venue for our band and maybe for a lot of bands. It’s just one of those places where you look forward to playing. You look at the schedule and see Hamburg is coming up and you always look forward to it. Something about that room, it’s tiered all along the sides and the back, so it lifts to elevate the audience up more, and somehow it’s a big room, but somehow it feels more intimate because you can see all the faces a lot easier than when the crowd’s below. So I don’t know, maybe that’s part of it, but it’s a special place, and so I was happy to capture that one for sure. :59
On recording an album of shorter, stand-alone songs after 2 heavy concept records – I know that I was pushing for shorter songs and something less conceptual. One of the challenges when, in the future and you wanna play a concert and you say, “Okay, what can you play? We’re playing the new stuff and we wanna place the other older stuff”, and you look at Similitude and Great Adventure, and it’s really hard to pull out standalone songs without doing the whole thing. We end up doing a medley of those. So I was looking forward to having an album that has more stand-alone songs that can fit into a future show. That we can play out of context and they’ll make sense. I just thought it would be fun to play some shorter songs, and even though I’m guilty of bringing in most of the longest songs, the irony of that. Yeah, I don’t know that we really thought we would just do a single, and then we have the longer songs that pretty much take up an entire disk, and then we had all these short songs. I think it was Mike (Portnoy’s) idea to do the whole Innocence and Danger split. The poppy, shorter songs, and the epics. So that made sense to us. So we went that way. 3:37
On creating “The Great Similitude Medley” – It takes a while just to get it short enough, that’s the problem, and we kept evolving it. The challenge is, “How does it end?” because you wanna have a satisfying ending. Both of those previous albums had very satisfying endings, but it took two hours to get to the ending, and how do you create that same sense of satisfaction without taking two hours, taking 30 minutes instead? So we tried to do it that way, and it evolved. Actually, I can’t remember now when we started doing the longer (version). At some point, we started doing both the end of Great Adventure and the end of Similitude. It wasn’t like that when we started it. I think the key is we end up cutting verses, so you would do a verse and a chorus, and then if there’s some cool bridge or something, then you’d find a way to lead into the next song, and it’s just a puzzle, and it’s a fun puzzle to solve. I’ve never personally been a big fan of medleys because I always feel like I wanna hear more of the songs that are skipping over, but I can’t. I know it can be done. There are some medley’s that I really, really love. I’m a big Genesis fan, and so on Three Sides Live, there’s the “In the Cage” medley, if you’re familiar with that album, and I’ve always thought that that was done really, really well. So I know it can be done. I hope we did it. I don’t know if I can be objective about it. 5:50
On if he saves his studio keyboard programming to use when playing live – Well, for the last 15 years or so, I’ve mostly been using software since I record on my computer, I use software. A lot of it is software emulation of analog keyboards and things like that. But I mostly have used that, so it’s really easy to just save my settings for all the stuff that I recorded. Usually, live, it’s the exact sound that I used on the album. In the last year or so, I’ve been really getting back into hardware keyboards, so analog synthesizers. So I’m not sure what’s gonna happen on the next tour as far as re-creating those sounds, because it’s hard to bring that gear on tour, it’s so heavy and expensive to fly with. The other challenge live is that Neal (Morse) and I don’t always play live what we played on the album, and it’s just logistics. For example, if he had a certain section (where) he happened to play a dominant keyboard part and he played the acoustic guitar, but we need the acoustic guitar there, so live he plays the acoustic guitar and I play whatever part he had played. Sometimes I’m trying to figure out how I can do both his part and my part at the same time, and there’s ways to cheat a little bit to do those things, the old one-finger chord trick, left hand’s playing chords and bass notes with one finger with while I’m playing something else up here. There are ways to do that, but I try not to. 8:22
On why “Not Afraid, Pt. 1” was left out of the live set – It was probably timing, but it may have been (that) you’re trying to create some hills and valleys on the show. On a record, you can have a longer quiet section that works but live it’s too much. It’s too long. Maybe that was part of it. I’m not sure. I can’t remember, it’s been a few years now since we did the tour. I can’t remember exactly. 10:45
On arranging the cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – Prior to us even recording the album, I had an idea to cover it, but all I really knew for sure that I wanted to do was the end. I wanted to have the big slow (section), slow it down, and the big orchestration and the big vocals, do the end, from the “Sail on silver girl” part through the end. Everybody had gone home, Randy (George, bass) and Eric (Gillette, guitar) had gone home from the sessions and we thought we were done. I said, “Hey, Neal, what do you think about it, can we try something with this?” So that whole intro part that you’re talking about, it was almost an improvisation. Mike and I and Neal, kinda jammed through that, and it just sort of tumbled out as we went through this thing, and sometimes it just sort of happens when you’re all in the room. 11:52
On how he started working with Neal Morse – A little over 10 years ago, he was wanting to put together a new backing band for his prog solo stuff. So I think Testimony II may have just come out and he was working on Momentum, that’s what it was, and he knew he wanted a new band for Momentum. I’ve been a big fan since the early Spock’s Beard days, and I knew Randy George from some other connections that we had. There was a posting on some email list, it was a prog email list or it might have been a Christian prog email list or something, that I never looked in this inbox, hardly ever. I subscribed to this list and they all went into a folder. I remember now, I clicked on it by accident, I missed and clicked on that folder, and it loaded up and it said, “Neal Morse holding open auditions for a new band”, and I had no idea how old, this email could have been like a year old for all I knew, but it wasn’t, it was pretty new. So I sent him a YouTube video audition, and then a bunch of people did that, and then he invited certain people to come down to audition in person in Nashville. So the first couple of years were just supporting him on his solo stuff, and then he had the idea that maybe we should start doing things as a band for the Grand Experiment album. 13:28
On his band We Came From Space – We CameFrom Space, largely consists of some guys that I went to high school with. All three of us never really played in a band together before, and I kind of reconnected, and it was like, “We should do something”. Our initial mission was, we should record music that would be like what we wanted to listen to when we were all in high school together. So that puts us around like late 70s, early 80s, so that sort of stuff. So you had the prog stuff from the 70s bleeding, bleeding over into the 80s, and then you had some of the new wave stuff, and you have people like Joe Jackson, that we’re doing this weird (style), started out kind of punk, but then got sophisticated and things like that. So that was kind of some of the stuff we were listening to back then. So we just started writing, it was just a recording project for the better part of 10 years, we put out three full-length records and an EP, and just this past year, we said, “We should start playing some shows”. So we were just getting going, playing some shows, we did a couple of support shows for Mike Portnoy’s The Winery Dogs, those seemed to go pretty well. No tour plans specifically. We’re staying regional, just things, places that we can drive to, but it’s a lot of fun. We did these opening shows, and I realized just as I was walking out on stage, “I’m playing for a room for people that most of them don’t know who we are, aren’t here to see us” because that hasn’t been the case for 10 years. “Oh, we gotta try to win them over”. It was exhilarating because when we play a Neal Morse show, I know everybody there already loves the music, and all we have to do is just not mess it up. But yeah, it’s been really fun. I’ve also been doing some work with a band out of the New York City area called Stratospheerius. I’m not technically in the band, but they have a new album coming out that I play a lot on, and I have done some shows with them. The violent player is the new violin player for Kansas, Joe Deninzon, he’s the band leader for Stratospheerius. 15:34
On the health of guitarist Eric Gillette – As far as I know, he’s doing great. Yeah, he had this couple of weird things happen that they took care of. If you go on his Facebook forum it describes in much detail everything that happened. Yeah, I think he’s recovered. Well, as far as I’m aware, and doing good, thanks for asking. 18:53
On upcoming NMB plans – Neal just announced a new solo prog album, part one, and then part two is coming out after the first of the year. But I think he’s gonna be done working on it himself as far as recording it in the next month or so. In August, we’re doing MorseFest, which is the thing that Neal does, traditionally, a weekend event in the Nashville area, but this year we’re doing Nashville and we’re going to the Netherlands, so the first European MorseFest. So we’re excited about that, that’s in August, and we have nothing scheduled beyond that. But I’m hopeful and optimistic that sometime later this fall, we might start writing and we’ll see. Pretty much all the other guys in the band or full-time musicians, except me actually. In this economy of music, you have to be doing multiple projects and multiple bands to make a living, and that’s what these guys are doing, plus, they love to do it. They like to be busy all the time. I actually am a software developer. So I do that, and as much music as I can squeeze into my schedule on top of that. 19:53
