Neal Morse: Announces great news…..

Neal Morse states, «I`m so pleased to announce that my new solo prog concept album Sola Gratia will be available everywhere September 11th! Sola Gratia quickly came together at the beginning of this year and I’ve been fortunate to be able to work remotely with my dear friends and long-time collaborators Mike Portnoy, Randy George, Eric Gillette, Bill Hubauer, and Gideon Klein on this project».

«The title Sola Gratia of course has echoes of my 2007 album Sola Scriptura, about the life of Martin Luther, but was in fact originally the result of a simple misunderstanding between me and my wife, Cherie. I was talking to Cherie about debuting this new piece at Morsefest 2020, and she said she thought it would be good for me to do a solo album. However, I thought she said Sola album and – because some of the new ideas involved Paul’s aggressive pursuit of the early Christians, I could see a link to some of the themes of persecution in Sola Scriptura».

In the absence of You Tube link from the new album, here are the whole and extreme good album Sola Sciptura,

The music was recorded virtually in April 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus lockdown with long term collaborators Mike Portnoy (drums) and Randy George (bass): «It’s the first album we have ever made remotely: I sent them the basic tracks and asked if they wanted to rearrange things, but they just said ‘No, it’s great!’, so they just played to it and sent their parts back over. It wasn’t an easy way to make an album, but creating always has its challenges, no matter how you do it».

 As Morse explains, it was this process that decided that Sola Gratia was to be a Neal Morse album, rather than being credited to The Neal Morse Band: «With the Neal Morse Band, the whole band works together on the writing, and while Eric Gillette plays some guitar and Bill Hubauer has added some keyboards on this one, neither of them wrote – or is singing – on this album».

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