Don't forget The Separated Man, which might be my favorite out of all of those, except for maybe Alive Again, which I have a special attachment to for personal reasons.
I had forgotten about that, I always forget how long it is, but it is nearly 18 minutes in length, but then where do we stop? Should we include "The Conclusion" as well, being over 16 minutes in length? Maybe if Neal had released all of his albums on vinyl, we could make the argument of only including the epics that are just that one song on a side of vinyl (or more, as would be the cast for "World Without End").
IIRC, both Neal and Eric played the Steve Morse solo at Morsefest last year. Neal played the first part of it and then Eric took it over till the end.
Oh I didn't know that, but that's pretty cool! I hope Neal gets around to releasing that show before the end of the decade!
Call me crazy, but The Great Nothing would be one of my lowest ranked Neal epics. It is good, but it feels like work to get through it nowadays, to where I literally never listen to it anymore. Long epics are so time-consuming , and he has so many, most of which I love way more, so it just never makes it into the rotation.
I've been re-listening to all of the SB albums in the last couple of weeks so the song is fairly fresh in my mind, and I think, like you, I had grown tired of it, but coming back to it after a year or two, it still holds up for me as a pretty great Neal Epic, at least among his six SB albums (definitely a step up from "The Healing Colors Of Sound", and maybe a bit better than "The Water"). I think only "The Light" might beat "The Great Nothing" in terms of Neal's longer SB pieces for me. Though I do agree - epics are pretty time-consuming, but they make for great long car-ride playlists!
Between, SB, TA and his solo stuff, though, I wouldn't rank "The Great Nothing" too high, definitely not even Top 5 (most of which would be Transatlantic anyway), and possibly not even top 10, but thinking about how they'd all rank would take a LOOOONG time (at least 25 minutes
).
-Marc.