Neal Morse Returns with Another Great New Band
"No Hill for a Climber" an exciting debut from Neal Morse & the Resonance
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection!. I recently had the honor of visiting again with progressive rock legend Neal Morse, who is possibly the busiest musician on the planet. Between solo albums, the Neal Morse Band, Transatlantic, and Flying Colors, his annual MorseFest (U.S. and now Europe as well), streaming music app, church music commitments, and more, the guy never seems to stop.
Morse is back with a debut album with a new band, Neal Morse & the Resonance, which plays a brand of progressive rock that is both familiar and fresh. I spoke with Neal about the band and the debut album, No Hill for a Climber.
Let’s get to that story.
In modern progressive rock, there are few artists who have been as prolific or as successful as Neal Morse. The founder of Spock’s Beard, Morse struck out on his own as a solo artist in 2002, releasing 11 studio solo progressive rock albums, six singer-songwriter solo albums, nine worship albums, more than 20 live recordings, and a fan club release every other month.
He has also released four albums with The Neal Morse Band, three covers albums with Mike Portnoy and Randy George, three post-Spock’s Beard albums with his supergroup Transatlantic (featuring Portnoy of Dream Theater, Roine Stolt of the Flower Kings, and Pete Trewavas of Marillion), three albums with Flying Colors, and two albums with D’Virgilio, Morse & Jennings (a collaboration with ex-Spock’s and current Big Big Train drummer/vocalist Nick D’Virgilio and Haken vocalist Ross Jennings).
In short, Morse keeps busy.
It’s understandable that when he suddenly found himself without a progressive rock project scheduled for 2024, Morse simply created a new one. He put together a new prog rock group called Neal Morse & the Resonance with some younger musicians he’d been working with in Tennessee, where he resides, and the band’s debut album, No Hill for a Climber, will drop on Nov. 8 on Inside Out Music.
“I didn’t have anything going on in 2024, progressive rock-wise,” Morse said. “I had (2024 singer-songwriter album) Late Bloomer, and I knew I was going to do some (tour) dates. When I first started thinking about No Hill for a Climber it was near the end of 2023, and I was looking at 2024 and I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing.”
Morse talked with former Genesis and Frank Zappa drummer Chester Thompson backstage at a Steve Hackett concert in Nashville. That planted the seed of doing an album with Thompson, which is also currently in the works, but it didn’t fill up his 2024.
“I was talking with my wife, and she said, ‘Why don’t you try doing something with these awesome young guys that are around?’ We’ve sort of developed this circle of young musicians that are sort of around in our world,” Morse said.
Those musicians include Chris Riley, Andre Madatian and Philip Martin, who had played at Neal’s annual MorseFest, various Christmas concerts, and other events. The Morse family had known Martin since he was a boy, and he’s done percussion at the last several iterations of MorseFest. Riley plays bass at Morse’s church and has been a contributor at the Radiant School, a program Morse runs out of his studio each year.
“(Riley) came to like five (Radiant School sessions) in a row or something. Every year he would come,” Morse said. “And when he would play what he had been working on, the whole place would just buzz. Everybody from all over the house and studio would come in there and go, ‘What is that? Wow, that’s amazing.’ Chris is really kind of left field. Expect the unexpected with Chris.”
Morse was inspired by Riley’s affinity for soundscapes to include some of those on his recent “Joseph” concept albums — The Dreamer: Joseph, Part One (2023) and The Restoration: Joseph, Part Two (2024).
“Andre Madatian was also an obvious choice,” Morse said. “He’s a great guitar player that we’ve known for about 10 years. Local guy, does a lot of local sessions.”
There was one addition to the band who wasn’t a familiar face for Morse — singer Johnny Bisaha, who adds lead and harmony vocals on No Hill for a Climber.
“I’d gotten together with the other guys and written and created the album, actually, and here we were supposed to deliver in mid-May and it was toward the end of April, and we didn’t have anybody that could hit the high notes,” Morse said. “We didn’t have the singer, and we’ve written all this stuff, just planning to have somebody that can bring it. We really wanted the end of (the epic title track) to be in E, I remember. I knew (the song was) way beyond anything I can do.”
Morse got Bisaha’s number from a mutual friend. The two met and Bisaha sang for Morse and got the gig. He came over the next week and recorded.
While Morse has a fine voice of his own, having an additional vocalist with a higher range has been a common theme in his bands. D’Virgilio filled that role in Spock’s Beard, Eric Gillette sings the higher parts for The Neal Morse Band, etc. Bisaha has a bit of a different tone than D’Virgilio but a similar range.
Those five musicians, along with Joe Ganzelli’s drum contributions, resulted in No Hill for a Climber, a five-song debut album drenched in progressive rock that both feels familiar and offers something fresh. It isn’t difficult to identify Morse’s fingerprints in the music, but working with a different group of artists gives this album a unique flavor not found elsewhere in the veteran progger’s considerable catalog. There are bits that sound like they could have been from Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, or a Morse solo album, but there are also plenty of modern twists and turns in the music that sound unlike anything Morse has released before.
No Hill for a Climber is constructed much like Spock’s Beard’s V album in that it is bookended by two long tracks, with three shorter songs in the middle. That is not to say the two albums sound alike, although both were mixed by Rich Mouser.
The album was recorded at Neal’s home studio in Tennessee.
“Almost everything that you hear, we did together here in the studio,” he said. “There wasn't very much that was done their homes.”
Lyrically, the songs on No Hill for a Climber follow suit with other post-Spock’s Beard Morse projects in that they deal with spiritual subject matter. At times, this is overt, and sometimes it’s more metaphorical. This is something that can turn off some listeners, but by now this should be the expected norm when listening to songs from Morse projects. Most of the musicians he has worked with since leaving Spock’s Beard range from having a spiritual nature to practicing devout Christianity.
For me, there weren’t too many in-your-face religious moments, but like the amount of salt on your French fries, that’s a matter of personal taste everyone must consider for themselves.
The name of the album and its massive title track were taken from the novel Demon Copperhead by Barbra Kingsolver, but No Hill for a Climber is not conceptual or related thematically to the book.
The album opens with the nearly 21-minute epic “Eternity in Your Eyes,” written by Morse, Madatian, and Riley. The song opens with a big, sweeping, cinematic feel before breaking into and out of soundtrack territory and crashing into the progressive rock universe. Neal’s vocals kick in a little less than four minutes in, and he’s rarely, if ever, sounded better. A highlight of the song is a dreamy middle section that seems more reminiscent of the Flower Kings than any of Neal’s bands (including Transatlantic).
Around 12 minutes into “Eternity in Your Eyes,” Bisaha gets his first solo spotlight on vocals and it’s a breathtaking moment as he nails the song’s titular lyrics before the song takes a left turn and speeds up. Of course, there’s a big, majestic, prog ending. That type of ending is a signature of Morse’s work, but the rest of the song takes the listener to many places they’ve never before experienced with Neal.
“I think what you're hearing is, you know, the elements that the other guys brought in,” Morse said. “The ‘Northern Lights’ section was from one of Chris Riley's demos. And I think we actually played to his demo. And then we go into that extended wah-wah guitar solo thing, and then put Johnny Bisaha in, singing the chorus and the quiet part. I think all of that stuff just gives it a different flavor.”
“Thief” is something unlike anything Morse has done in the past, starting with a funky bass groove, otherworldly group vocals, and a hushed lead vocal from Neal before jumping into something more Pink Floyd-y and then finding a faster gear and building to dizzying instrumental King Crimson-esque heights before coming to a dead stop.
“That was Chris's thing. That was something that he had actually brought into the Radiant School,” Morse said of the King Crimson-y section the song builds into before stopping. “I was stuck on ‘Thief.’ I didn't know where to go. I got up to that point, and I knew I wanted to do something really intense. I thought we were going to stay in that same kind of tempo. I was thinking of doing something instrumental like that. (Riley) sat down at the piano and played that figure. I'm like, ‘Let's try putting that in there.’
“I didn't know how to peak it out, you know? It needed to peak out and then go back into thief, right? And normally we would do some blistering, fiddly bit. That would be the typical thing that I would think of. But I was like, ‘I've done that kind of a lot. What if everybody just freaked out?’ You know, how on Sergeant Pepper’s, they told the London Philharmonic guys to just do whatever they felt, as long as they just all landed together. So I said, ‘What if we do that as a band? Just go nuts and all try to stop together.’ And so, well, obviously, that's what we did. But anyway, that's one of my favorite moments on the album.”
Once the song stops, it returns to the unusual opening vocal chorus of “thieeeeeeef!” and the bass part from the beginning, and then it turns jazzy before busting back into full-on progressive rock. It is a remarkable and delightfully surprising song that reveals itself more over repeat listens.
“All the Rage” is the album’s most accessible song, featuring some wonderful harmony vocals with Morse and Bisaha. Neal takes the lead at first and gives way to Johnny. The rhythm section supports this song nicely and there’s a beautiful piano solo in the middle as the rest of the band falls away. After the solo, the song goes through some brief twists and tempo changes before finding its way back to the chorus.
Morse said his friend Geoff Bailie suggested Bisaha sing the second verse and second chorus as a way to introduce “Neal’s new singer” to the world, with the thought that “All the Rage” would be the album’s first single. It almost didn’t happen that way.
“He (Bailie) was like, ‘What if you have him sing the second verse and second chorus?’ And then I already knew I wanted to sing the upper harmony,” Morse said. “But I have to give credit to Geoff for that idea. And I wasn't sure, because I liked my vocal on the second verse, but I had Johnny do it, and then I thought, ‘Yeah, this is wisdom. This is the way it should be.’”
The song most like another one of Morse’s projects to my ear is “Ever Interceding,” which is a more acoustic and folky number that wouldn’t have been out of place on a D’Virgilio, Morse & Jennings album. The difference is that it isn’t drenched in three-part harmonies the way DMJ songs typically are. It’s a beautiful showcase for Bisaha’s vocals and gives the album a different flavor with the prominent use of the acoustic guitar. It was a song that came together quickly.
“I just came in here (to the studio) and and wrote that,” Morse said. “And then I was thinking, obviously I wanted to keep it in D, and then that meant I couldn't sing it. So to me, whoever the mystery person was that we were going to get to sing the high parts in ‘No Hill,’ obviously, would sing all of ‘Ever Interceding.’ And so, I think it's great that Johnny is featured so much on the album.”
The interplay of Riley’s bass with the acoustic guitar near the song’s end section fits together beautifully, and it’s a song that could serve as a single as well.
The title track closes the album in grand fashion at nearly 29 minutes long. Morse said he wrote parts of ‘No Hill for a Climber’ while on an airplane, singing some of the melody bits into his phone while walking up and down the plane’s center aisle.
The opening is heavier than much of what we’ve gotten from Morse over the years — with an Anglagard-meets-King Crimson vibe alternating with a lighter, more Transatlantic-y bit, and a bouncy section more akin to something off a Morse solo album. It almost doesn’t matter what kind of progressive rock one likes, because chances are there’s some of it in this song, which Morse, Madatian, and Riley wrote.
Just after the opening five minutes, the vocals start. Bisaha and Morse trade aggressive vocals and juxtapose those with an angelic delivery by Bisaha, singing:
There’s no hill for a climber
No chance to ascend; just look around
No hope to go higher
No help for the one who’s been held down
No hill for a climber
After a soaring middle proggy section, some background voices arrive to provide atmosphere behind an acoustic guitar solo. I’d rather not spoil all of the surprises and twists and turns in the middle stages of the song, but suffice it to say that much of it isn’t what you’ve come to expect from a Neal Morse band. Working with these musicians has provided plenty of freshness and variety to the things Morse has always done well. The “Burn it Down” section of “No Hill for a Climber” seems particularly out of his normal character to me.
The song eventually builds up to a peak of dizzy, breathless prog bliss and then ends. Or does it? There is a brief spell of silence, serving as a false ending, before an orchestral bit swells up for the real ending. That idea came from Madatian.
“All of us, to some degree, but Andre and I particularly go to the symphony hall a lot. We listen to a lot of classical music,” Morse said. “Andre writes classical music. He's a music teacher as well as a guitar player, and he was the one like, ‘Oh, dude, at the end you’ve got to have one of those big sections.”
As someone who owns an obscene amount of Morse’s work on physical media, I’m well acquainted with his music. I continue to enjoy each new release in its own right, but I didn’t know he still had the capacity to surprise me. He does. Neal Morse and the Resonance is a treasure box overflowing with musical surprises.
It’s an album that might bring a great deal of joy to fans who have drifted away from Morse’s work over the years. Fans of symphonic progressive rock will likely find a lot to like in No Hill for a Climber, but there are bits throughout the album that could appeal to a wide variety of musical tastes.
No Hill for a Climber will be available digitally, as a two-CD Digipak that includes a second disc of instrumentals, a standard single-CD release in a jewel case, and as a double-LP vinyl album in a gatefold cover. For more information and to preorder the album, visit nealmorse.com.
Tracklist:
1. Eternity In Your Eyes (20:51)
2. Thief (5:22)
3. All The Rage (5:32)
4. Ever Interceding (6:29)
5. No Hill for A Climber (28:49)
For my full interview with Neal, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 139 of the Michael’s Record Collection Podcast. Neal spoke about his new bandmates, making the record, some background behind the songs, his recent solo acoustic tour (which I got to see in a coffee shop in Lakeland, Florida), an upcoming project he did with Chester Thompson and Phil Keaggy, and more. Please note there were some audio issues with Neal’s mic dropping out at times, but it isn’t too bad, and it clears up about 12-13 minutes in.
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