Neal Morse is one of the most prolific musicians on the planet. With the release of their debut record, No Hill For A Climber, he is about to launch a new band called Neal Morse & The Resonance. Once again, Neal graciously took some time to dig deep into this record, and his recently released solo album Late Bloomer.
Please press the PLAY button below for the MisplacedStraws Neal Morse Interview –
On how The Resonance was formed – I’ve known most of the guys, with the exception of Johnny Bisaha, who came in at the 11th hour, you might say. I’ve known Andre Madatian for about 10 years. Same with Chris Reilly. Philip Martin, I’ve known his whole life. He’s young. He’s like 22. We’re friends with his parents and go to the same church. Philip has actually gone out on tour with me as a drum tech for Mike Portnoy, very brave young man. So Philip has been around a lot and, and he’s gotten, he’s developed as a musician, as a person. It’s been great to see. Andre is a professional guitar player, and orchestrator, and teacher at a local university, and also plays in a lot of local bands and pretty big touring bands too. He’s kind of a local session guy. Chris Riley is our left-field guy. He would be kind of like the Roine Stolt of the band. The guy who comes up with all the really unexpected stuff. I first got to know Chris a little bit when he started to play bass, I think at the church I was going to, and then he started coming to the Radiant schools. I have a week-long school things in my studio and people come. He was such a star. He would play his music and everybody would come running and go, “That’s amazing”.
So, when I was looking out at 2024, I didn’t really have anything lined up. Being that Mike is back in Dream Theater, that kind of takes all my bands off the table for the moment, right? I was kicking around with my wife, and she was like, “Why don’t you try something, doing something with all these awesome local guys?” Andre had played a guitar solo on the Joseph album. Phillip Martin’s been playing percussion at MorseFest for some years. But Johnny Bisaha the singer, he was the surprised guy that I was hearing all this high (vocal) as I was writing a lot of this music. As we were writing it, we were writing it for things that were out of my range, vocals that were out of my brain. We were supposed to deliver the out, deliver the album in May to be mixed, but we didn’t have a singer. Towards the end of April, we still didn’t have one and I wasn’t really giving it the attention that it needed. One guy flaked he was going to do it and then just totally flaked and didn’t show up. So I called Gabe Klein, a friend of mine, and he said, “Oh, I got the guy. I’ve been doing this gig and he’s just got this amazing voice”. So Johnny came over around the end of April and he came right at the beginning of May and in two days sang all, all the stuff on the album in two days. Yeah. So he’s, he’s incredible.
On if he had a plan as to where the album would go – No, we were just going where they seemed to want to go. It just happened. “Eternity In Your Eyes” was originally a really long piece. It just kind of grew and grew. Man, I’m really happy with the way all of it turned out. The shorter songs too. I mean, it really, really came out really strong.
On how he constructs one of his epic tracks – We have a little bit of a roadmap, but most of the time it’s not. Most of the time you’re just kind of, “Well, here we are”. We’ll say in the room, “Well, where should we go from here guys?” Somebody will make a suggestion. Maybe they’ll have a little riff and you start kicking it around and playing it. Then it becomes something very different. But it happens in all kinds of different ways. For example, with “Eternity In Your Eyes”, one of the jobs as producer was to listen to the guys’ demos and their songs and figure out how to fit them in to what we were doing. So the beginning of “Eternity In Your Eyes” is actually an orchestra piece Andre wrote. I had the idea to put that at the beginning. That was after it became so epic. Once it was epic thing, I wanted to have a more epic intro. So I started listening to Andre’s orchestra stuff and spliced out some pieces and put it in there. I also spliced pieces of Chris’s demos and that’s where the “Northern Light” section and the “Hammer and Nail” section came parts of Chris Riley’s stuff that he submitted.
So some of those things were already really formed and we didn’t change it hardly at all. I think all that we did was play to Chris’s demo actually on “Northern Lights”, except I, as it went, I thought, “Guys, this is such a cool vibe. We’re going to want this to be longer”. So we cut, pasted, and added the piano solo. I wanted it to go around again. Then it was like, “Well, where should we go from there?” Originally we went straight into “Hammer and Nail” but that felt a little bit funny to have two of Chris’s vocals right back to back. Then I had the idea to do a splice, put in that whole jam section to kind of give it some space, and also so I could play a really long guitar solo. But it’s very much of an instinctive, step-by-step kind of thing.
On creating “Thief” – I have to quote someone who said they were asking him in early interviews with Bob Dylan, I think. They were asking him where those, all his crazy lyrics came from. I think he said, “Man, who knows where any of this stuff comes from?” I mean, ultimately I think it all comes from God, but I don’t know.
I was taking an afternoon and I just had that idea in my mind. I even told my grandson about it because he likes sort of funny music. So I woke up and I said, “Hey, Maddox, I have this idea to go, THIEF DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN” I had the string bass in my head, THIEF DUN DUN DUN DUN I don’t know where it came from, I just woke up with it, really. Which happens with a lot of artists, actually, if you start looking at the writings of songwriters, they’ll say how Paul McCartney dreamed yesterday, and so on, but yes, I don’t know. So it started off with that. Then I sort of started singing the line in between and then I didn’t know where to go from there.
Then I landed on that and started that sixth thing. I was into the “everything you touch”, I thought that was good. I wrote that on piano. I remember sitting at the piano but then I didn’t know where to go after that. I was really stuck. I had the “My Lord”, boom, I knew I wanted to go into some kind of gnarly, sort of a froggy section, but everything I tried just wasn’t working for me. I have a bunch of different versions with MIDI files of me trying different things and nothing worked. So I called Chris he came over and he had the idea to put in that, it was really his concept, we worked on it together and added that thing. My favorite moments on the whole album was when it’s picking up. It’s picking up, and you know what? I knew I wanted to peak and then stop, and then we’d go, “THIEF”, I could even see playing it live at that point, you know how you do some crazy thing and and you peek out a big solo stop, the audience goes, “Yeah”. Then you come back in with the small thing, right? So I had that thought, but I didn’t know how to peak it out.
I was thinking, writing some really fast thing that we would all stop. I don’t know. That seems kind of, I felt like I’ve done that a lot or we’ve done that. So I thought, what if everybody just falls out and freaks out and just goes nuts spontaneously, which is what we wound up doing. Interesting about part is the original tracking of that was bass and drums. Phillip was playing drums and I was playing bass and we just did that. It was just bass and drums to start. Then we overdubbed all that other stuff on it. That’s Andre doing that crazy stuff. Then I couldn’t be more happy with how that song turned out. It’s really weird and, I think, super cool.
On what led to his singer/songwriter record Late Bloomer – Oh, well, we took about this time last year we, my wife and I took an RV trip out to California for my sister had her 70th day and we wanted to go out and celebrate with her. So I was on a long journey and we were camping and when I’m on long journeys and camping, I almost always write songs that are more normal sort of songs. I had some others that had been sitting around for a while. Like “I’m Gonna Miss You”, I wrote, I don’t know how many years ago, my son moved out of the house, got married, and moved out of the house. So it’s personal songs. It’s kind of a, it’s a singer-songwriter album. I get inspired and I write songs that I want to record and so I just do it.
The thing that’s interesting about Late Bloomer, I experimented on that album and recorded it, it’s all me. It’s sort of like my McCartney’s “bowl of cherries” album, where he’s playing and there’s something sort of charming about that, I think. I did quite a few of those tracks without a click track. I just played because I was inspired. I read a lot about how they recorded “Penny Lane” with no click track. The Beatles never used a click track that I know of. One guy would play, everybody else would play to it, which seems like it’d be pretty hard, but their good enough to do that. “Penny Lane” McCartney played the piano track by itself, the whole track from that, and so I wanted to try, I wanted to see if I could do it. So it’s a little looser, but that can be cool. As Kevin Gilbert once told me, “Neal, perfect records are a drag”. I was getting bummed out about a guitar coming early in early on “Thoughts” by Spock’s Beard or something, all the little imperfections. He’s like, “No, man, perfect records are a drag, man”. So I’ve embraced that more in my later years.
On if he’ll continue to record with The Resonance –Well, I hope so. I’m never one for predictions or unless we already have plans to do so. Which we don’t really because I’m involved. My summer project was making an album with Chester Thompson. So that’ll be the next kind of big frontline release that’ll come out for me and that’ll come out probably in the spring of next year, I would imagine. I’ve got these three MorseFests, which are a huge undertaking. We’re doing both the Joseph albums, Jesus Christ, the Exorcist, and a debut from the trio with Nick D’Virgilio and Ross Jennings. So I’ve really got my hands full with that. So maybe when the smoke clears, we’ll consider. Either, playing live, I don’t know or another record, but I hope so.
On if he prefers doing MoreFest-type shows to a tour – I do like doing the gathering very much. One of the things is you get to set up in one place and rehearse all week in that place. The lighting guy, the front-of-house guy’s there, it seems like the productions are maybe a little bit sharper a lot of times. Touring is hard. So I love playing five minutes from my house, literally. We start at 7:30, play three hours till 10:30, I’m in bed by 11, it’s great. But I don’t know. I’m somebody who just kind of prays about things and does whatever I feel like the Lord wants me to do. So that’s what I’ll be doing about future and future albums and I’m sure it’ll be good.
