Randy George Discusses the New Neal Morse Band Album

Fresh off the recording sessions, the bassist gives up some clues on what NMB fans can expect from the fourth album.

The five members of the Neal Morse Band recently convened in Tennessee to begin work on the band’s fourth release. Riding high on the back-to-back progressive rock masterpieces The Similitude of a Dream and The Great Adventure, the band could be forgiven for having trepidation when approaching the follow-up.

I caught up with bassist Randy George to find out how the sessions went and what we can glean from them. We spoke about several topics, including his new Sweet Invention project’s EP, Streaming Out the Day (with his wife, Pamela), playing his local live gigs during the pandemic, the future of his other band, Ajalon, doing covers albums, and more. You can watch the entire interview at the link below, with the Neal Morse Band stuff toward the second half of the discussion.

So, what happened when George, Morse (keyboards, guitars, vocals), Mike Portnoy (drums), Eric Gillette (guitars, vocals), and Bill Hubauer (keyboards, vocals) got together at Neal’s studio?

First and foremost, the new album won’t continue the storyline of the last two predecessors. The Similitude of a Dream was an ambitious 2016 double album based loosely on a 1678 theological work called The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. The follow-up, 2019’s The Great Adventure continues the story from Similitude on another massive double album. The as-yet-untitled fourth album will be more like the band’s 2015 debut, The Grand Experiment in that it isn’t planned as a concept piece.

“I think the idea was to do songs standalone songs,” George said. “So, there's no running concept. We're not writing to a storyline. And we wrote that way, so that's probably what's going to end up being. That being said, there's probably a couple poppy type songs on there that are shorter, but there's lots of proggy-er songs. There's probably a 30-minute epic. I'm guessing somewhere around that time frame.”

Apart from the epic, George said the new songs will probably fit into the seven- to 12-minute range. There may also be something in between, in the 18- to 20-minute range.

The band spent just over a week together recording parts and working on songs. Lyrics were yet to be written, with Morse putting some scratch vocals in just to see what fit.

“Well, about eight days and then, Eric and I left,” said George. “Bill stayed an extra day. And of course, you know, we get home and then the next day we get the typical email: ‘Here's what happened after you left.’ Now there's a couple more songs. We're talking about maybe we could do it this way, as far as what kind of album it is — not so much conceptually, just how it's going to be laid out, you know? Do we have too much for one CD? Do we have enough for two?

“It's always a bunch of guesswork at first and again we don't really know until we sit and retrack everything and get everything right, move on, and start actually listening back to what we have. We make those decisions. Which songs are the album? What's the album? Is there something that just doesn't quite sit in line with the rest of the songs? You know, just, it's such an objective thing you have to just figure out.”

After the initial recording process, Portnoy laid down his drum tracks and then the balance of the record will be put together remotely. Bits will be sent to the band members so they can track their parts and the instrumentation can finally take shape.

“Everybody will basically start over with the music and doing their own parts and then we'll actually hear what it sounds like at some point, once some of the mixes start coming together,” George said. “A lot of times I'm tracking in a vacuum. I don't really know what it's going to sound like. I just know what we scratched out and so I play along those lines.”

There are times during the tracking process where a bass part might not fit as it originally did, so George will go back and revamp sections as needed to suit the songs. Once that is finished, lyric writing comes next and then the vocals will be recorded.

George anticipates the album release sometime late this summer or early fall. Recording, tracking, and producer Rich Mouser’s magic all combine to take a few months.

“I think, potentially, you know, maybe August or September wouldn't be unrealistic (as a release date),” he said. “It just depends on how long it takes us to get it all together and write the lyrics, get it all recorded, and get it mixed. You know, three months, three-and-a-half months of just, you know, recording the parts, writing the lyrics, sorting out all the vocals, and getting mixes to Rich.”

George said the band, which toured the last album extensively, will want to take the fourth album out on the road, but there is a lot of uncertainty in the live music industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It's a given that we would want to tour it. But, you know, that part of the world is going to have to get up and running again,” he said. “Promoters are going to have to regain their confidence in audience turnout. That's going to be the biggest thing to turn around. They’re not going to want to make you the guarantees they used to make you. They don’t know what to expect going forward and so that makes it almost impossible to do anything. It wasn’t hugely lucrative as it was.

“You know, the band makes money touring but if all the promoters decided they were only going to pay half of what they did pay before, we wouldn't be able to undertake a tour. But then again, if we have to, we may do some select dates in strategic places — maybe like a couple nights on the West Coast, a couple of nights in Chicago, a couple of nights on the East Coast kind of thing.”

In addition to discussing the latest from the Neal Morse Band, the discussion with George included the following tidbits:

• He and Pamela released a four-song EP under the band name Sweet Invention and it’s available wherever you buy your digital music. (Personal note: it’s good and you should check it out.)

• He’d like to make Sweet Invention a full band project and perhaps turn the EP into a full album.

• When he and Pamela play live, they like to surprise the audience by doing songs that are hits but not the types of songs that typically are covered, such as “Hello, It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren or “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.

• He has incorporated a version of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” into his live gigs played by an acoustic duo.

• Ajalon isn’t officially dead as a band, and he’s open to doing a new album — which would be the band’s first since 2009’s This Good Place (and fourth overall) — but he said it’s unlikely it would happen and that it’s kind of up to vocalist Wil Henderson to initiate.

• The 2020 edition of MorseFest went well despite a smaller, more socially distanced crowd. The event maintained its same vibe despite being in front of fewer people in the live audience. He enjoyed playing the Sola Gratia material.

• He’s been pushing for “Green Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf on the covers albums he has done with Morse and Portnoy but said Neal feels the lyrics are too silly.

You can check out the full interview here.