but i can't shake the feeling like they weren't REALLY into a sequel.
Exactly, I feel the same way after 2 or 3 full listens to the album. It feels just like Neal described it, a finished, unrelated to TSOAD album that he tinkered with using pro tools to make a sequel. That's why the biggest complaint we've seen here is that the "Love That Never Dies" theme is repeated way too much, they worked a concept album on paper instead of writing a concept album.
It's still a great album and need more listens to enjoy it more, since still the songs are a blur in my head (I don't know which song is which, but that's common for me on big NM double concept albums). The only two spots I actively dislike so far are Hey ho whatever and Vanity Fair (which is very catchy, but annoys me, specially the circus music thing at the end, Haken did it SO MUCH BETTER back in the day )
Having seen the Making of DVD, I definitely got the sense that the rest of the band were very reluctant to do a sequel to TSOAD, especially Mike in the beginning, but they all seemed to let Neal do what he wanted - I mean, it *IS* the
Neal Morse Band after all...
Either way, it does make sense that Neal would try and copy-paste the LTND theme to make the album a bit more "cohesive" and have that musical thread throughout. Mike says on the DVD that had they known Neal was going to push hard for a TSOAD sequel, they would have written in themes from TSOAD into TGA, and to be honest, I don't hear a lot of them, and the couple that I do do not feature Mike on drums, which makes sense because he probably cut his drum tracks BEFORE Neal had decided the album was going to be a TSOAD sequel (I think? Maybe I am misremembering the timeline of events wrong...). It's definitely not as good of a sequel, musically speaking, as Testimony 2 was to Testimony, in the way that it included themes and ideas from the previous album.
However, that is not to say TGA isn't full of interesting and unique musical ideas itself, and given the narrative (that it is the son and not the father this time), I can see why there might not be a LOT of returning themes, but I would have liked to have heard more. Does anyone know exactly which themes do come back and where? I recognize a couple, but I haven't listened to TGA enough yet to pinpoint more.
-Marc.