Great news! Two things that excite me:
1. They seem to have taken more time for this album. The announcement said something about around a year. I was hoping they'd do that. Let's see if the result turns out different with this approach.
2. Randy George said something about Sola Scriptura. I would love this direction. Neal Morse CAN write darker, heavier music. I think it was about time he did that again 
Sounds like the album was nearly done early this year, with the intention for it to be a 1-disc album that had no concept and nothing to do with Similitude, but when they got together again in August, Neal decided he want to make it a Similitude sequel (of sorts), so they overhauled it and re-wrote most of it.
So, I'm going back into my old IC Newsletter emails from earlier this year, and seeing what I can find with regards to the making of this album. Here's some interesting bits.
From the January 2018 Newsletter:
I was in a different place than I've been with other albums. I didn't have a really strong feeling about the particular direction we should go. For awhile, when I was working on demos through 2017, I had felt like a Similitude 2 was what we should do, because I had some inspiration about some particular songs that I thought were very good and were based on the same book. However, as I worked on my material more through the month of December, I wound up feeling like perhaps it wasn't the right time. The band felt the same way and we wound up doing a really great Prog album. It has a lot of recurring themes throughout, but I'm still not sure what it will be as we haven't written any words and there is a lot of exploring left to do. It's a different album to me. There are some beautiful themes and some very exciting parts; some very good song bits...it's an amazing journey all it's own.
So even initially speaking through December and leading up to the band arriving, Neal had felt that a sequel to TSOAD was a possibility, but the band decided to just go at it with a clean slate. He also goes on to mention demos brought in by Eric and Bill, and them writing two epics with lengths of 25 and 17 minutes, as well as a ballad like "Shine" (by Transatlantic).
From the August 2018 Newsletter:
Monday morning, we had basically three hours to get the whole end section right because Bill was leaving on Tuesday. Mike was going to cut his drums and he had already started cutting his drums on Disc One. We had these three hours in the morning before Mike showed up to figure this thing out. And I remember thinking, "well... we're not quite there" and I remember looking at the clock and telling Bill, "Bill, we've got 45 minutes to sort this out and it's gotta happen, but I don't know if we're going to make it!" Needless to say, we did make it, Mike tracked his drums, and now we're all putting all are parts on it in our remote studios. Rich is going to start mixing in September and we hope to be done with it in October and release in January. That is the plan! And it looks like it's going to happen...
Looks like between January, the conference call they had in May or June, and the quick sessions in August, the album went from being a single (80 minute) album to a double, at least 90 minutes I imagine. Neal also mentions that the album wasn't finished in January, and that there was more work to do when they reconvened in the summer. It's not that they scrapped what they had, they just had more to add to it.
Now that the album has been revealed, I imagine that Neal will spill all the beans in the upcoming October Newsletter, which should be due out sometime this weekend or early next week. I wonder if the initial epics they wrote became individual tracks, or if this will be more of a Transatlantic-esque concept like Bridge Across Forever, where the shared themes are contained within the epics, or if they divided up the epics into individual tracks.
Either way, I suspect we'll get a double album that reaches 125 minutes with each disc at around 60-65 minutes each, and maybe a total of 22-25 tracks, perhaps with a closing epic. I can't wait to see the details of this album, as I'm sure it'll be contender for AOTY for 2019 (despite forthcoming releases from other favorite bands like Dream Theater and Big Big Train).
-Marc.
Topic: Official Neal Morse Appreciation Thread (Read 545309 times)
