As progressive rock continues
to regain ground in terms of sales and respectability, Neal Morse’s name
simultaneously gains increasing recognition in our larger culture as well.
As well it should. Morse has
served as one of the most important figures in the current revival of the
progressive rock scene, which began to re-emerge nearly two decades ago, since
its recognized heyday of the early 1970s, prior to the rise of disco and punk.
Over the last two decades, a number of acts, including Big Big Train, Dream
Theater, Spock’s Beard, The Flower Kings, Porcupine Tree, Agents of Mercy,
Frost*, Gazpacho, Tin Spirits, Ayreon, the Fierce and the Dead, and Riverside
have produced albums every bit the equal of those by Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull,
and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in the early 1970s. For better or worse, prog
(as its followers call it) has been characterized by elaborate lyrics and
stories, long (rarely less than six minutes) songs, intricate time changes, and
immaculate audio production. Every aspect of the release matters for a prog
artist, and the genre tends to attract an inordinate number of perfectionists.
As a master of the style, Neal Morse's longest song is the baroque “The Whirlwind,”
written with his bandmates in Transatlantic, clocking in at just four seconds
shy of 78 minutes, the limit of music a CD can hold. It tells the story of a
modern culture willfully ignorant of Christianity. The New Jerusalem arrives,
catching most citizens of the Earth unaware. This is not just a song, it’s an
epic. And, as an epic, it needs to be 78 minutes long.
To make Morse and his
reputation even more interesting, he has become an important, if unusual,
Christian evangelist for our time. In that strange twilight realm where
Christian culture and secular culture awkwardly meet as suggested by the very
title of “The Whirlwind,” there stands Morse, beckoning anyone and everyone to
enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
As Morse admitted in his
autobiography,
Testimony (Radiant, 2011), the mission field has been
rather dry, but it has not been without some success.
Though lacking a formal
“altar call”, Morse’s concerts resemble Pentecostal tent revivals as much as
they do traditional live rock performances. At one point in a recent concert,
recorded and released on CD and on DVD as “Testimony Two: Live in Los Angeles,”
Morse asks the crowd to raise their hands in a call and response fashion. “Oh,
raise your hands to heaven. It will do you no harm,” Morse assures his fans in
the midst of a song, complete with rousing guitar solos, drums solos, keyboard
solos, and full-on trumpet. “Oh, we love You tonight. Oh, I thank you Lord. .
. . Look what the Lord has done.” It is hard to imagine a similar scene at a
Led Zeppelin concert of the 1970s or a Pearl Jam concert of the 1990s.
As a rather staid Catholic, I
find this all foreign to my own personal practices in Mass, and I have yet to
understand the appeal of a charismatic service. But watching all of this on
DVD, it is clear it works very well in the context of a progressive rock
concert, and Morse offers all of this with such sincerity that the audience
wants to participate. I will be attending one of his concerts in just a month,
and I’ll be joined by my wife and two good friends from Chicago. We’re all
Catholic, and it will be interesting to see how we respond.
A History of Morse’s
music
I first encountered Morse’s
work with the release of Spock’s Beard’s first album,
The Light, back in 1995 while perusing new CDs in
Bloomington, Indiana. At the time, at least in the United States, very few
musicians openly embraced progressive rock as a label or a genre. Indeed, most
rock bands sadly shunned the label like the plague. A moody and more complex
form of punk, grunge, as well as what was called “alternative” was huge in the
American rock scene. Since prog had become unpopular in the late 1970s, many
groups such as Talk Talk (
The Colour of Spring, Spirit of Eden, and
Laughing Stock), XTC (
Skylarking), and the Cure (
Disintegration) had embraced much of the prog legacy without
necessarily claiming the prog mantle. Meanwhile, older progressive rock groups
such as Genesis, Yes, and Jethro Tull had embraced something essentially unprog
in the 1980s, and little hope seemed to exist for a re-emergence of the genre
by the beginning of the 1990s.
Then, suddenly, several prog
albums appeared on the American scene, including the progressive metal of New
York’s Dream Theater (
Images and Words, 1992) and England’s Marillion (
Brave, 1994). In 1995, another east-coast band,
Echolyn, released a prog album (
As the World) on a major label, and Spock’s Beard of
California released its first,
The Light on a small label with limited distribution.
Of these four, Spock’s Beard
intrigued me the most, though I would come to love Marillion’s very dark
Brave as well.
Taking their name from one of
the strangest of the original Star Trek episodes, “Mirror, Mirror,” in which
Captain Kirk travels to a parallel universe, Spock’s Beard embraced every
aspect of 1970s progressive rock, especially drawing upon Peter Gabriel-era
Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant, and King Crimson. The title song, “The Light,” is
controlled chaos. Beautiful and enchanting as a whole, it is maddening in
parts. Nearly 16 minutes long, the song explores a number of avenues, none of
them outwardly related, one part to another. Even Morse calls for a “straight
line” in his lyrics, as though pleading with himself to end the madness.
After a harmonious vocal
opening, the song descends into musical insanity, with odd beats, variable time
signatures, and instruments playing over, around, below, above, behind, and
next to one another. Only two things hold the song together: the drumming of
Nick D’Virgilio and Morse’s vocal talents. D’Virgilio, though a young man in
his mid-twenties when joining the 35-year old Morse in Spock’s, immediately
demonstrated his impressive skills in keeping the band’s music coherent with his
unique mixture of precision and soul. Within the rock world, one can with
assurance list D’Virgilio as one of the two or three best drummers.
Despite his own considerable
vocal and lyrical talents, Morse seems ready to explode at any moment in “The Light,”
barely controlling his rage. “You may call me Kennedy, but you cannot kill
me,” he states defiantly. “I am the father, the son, and the bastard,” he
growls a few moments later. Equally absurd, Morse becomes, in early-Peter
Gabriel fashion, one moment “the catfish man” and at another “Señor Valasco,”
his characters and personas changing dramatically by the minute. For all of
this, the song works, the album works, and the band works.
Over the next seven years,
Spock’s Beard continued to develop and deepen its sound, releasing
Beware of
Darkness (1996),
The Kindness
of Strangers (1998),
Day for
Night (1999), and
V (2000). While each album embraced the chaos of
“The Light” to varying degrees, each also increased the harmonies as the anger
of Morse’s voice and lyrics slowly dissipated. Layered and lush, each album
readily mixed hard rock, insightful lyrics, and evocative if not outright
voluptuous melodies. By 2000, many in and out of the progressive rock world
regarded Spock’s Beard as a major band. They were at the height of their fame.
The band’s sixth album, the
Morse-era masterpiece,
Snow,
appeared in 2002. A two-disc concept album, it tells the story of a would-be
messiah who realizes only after much struggle that his power (and, he is powerful,
possessing psychic abilities) comes from God and God alone. A beautiful enigma
of sorts,
Snow is much easier
to understand after Morse revealed that he had converted to Christianity about
a year before he began writing the album.
In the spiritually-tinged
song, “Wind at my Back,” Morse sings, through the mouth, heart, and soul of the
protagonist, the albino prophet, Snow:
And my soul has been kissed
Just
because you exist
You’re
the blue in my black
You’re
the wind at my back.
A devoted fan of progressive
rock since a young man in the 1980s and now a lecturer at the University of
Leeds, Nick Efford, writes:
I've
long admired Neal Morse as an artist, initially for his work with Spock's Beard
and latterly for his contributions to Transatlantic and Flying Colors. He was
instrumental in making SB one of the key bands of the progressive revival, in
my view. "V" is my favourite SB album and also the album where I
first became aware of Morse's spiritual leanings, evident in the lyrics of the
excellent opening track "At The End Of The Day.” That spirituality is
even more evident in the Christian allegory of follow-up "Snow", but
it is done with a relatively light touch. "Snow" can be enjoyed
purely for the tale it tells, without pondering too much on deeper meanings.
Efford touches on an
important subject in the prog community. At what level was Morse going to
allow his faith to influence his artistry, or would he simply give up
progressive music altogether just as Spock’s Beard had finally found its success
while simultaneously bringing success to the entire prog genre?
As many expected, Neal Morse
announced his departure from Spock’s Beard soon after the tour for that album.
Neither Morse nor any of the members of the band spoke much about this break-up
until very recently. In an interview with Ryan Sparks, roughly seven years
after leaving Spock’s, Morse revealed that at the time he had felt the
departure a necessity for his own spiritual growth. “It was just what I felt
in my spirit and what I felt inside. I felt like I couldn't be a part of it and
that God wanted me to separate from Spock's at that time. Getting to do another
album with Transatlantic is basically a whole other testimony.” Further, he
noted in an interview with Martien Koolen in 2003, he would not have felt right
“forcing” his religious views on the rest of the members of Spock’s Beard.
As it turned out, Morse fans
had no real reason to worry unless they were or are personally offended by
outright professions of faith. After his conversion to Christianity, Morse’s
love of progressive rock seems only to have increased, and he’s become the
master within the genre of the concept album and especially in its two-cd
variety. While many describe England’s Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree as “Mr.
Prog,” Morse has equal claim to the title. While Wilson’s vision is a dark and
brilliantly disturbing one, Morse’s is joyful to a degree unknown by most rock
artists, or humanity in general, for that matter. With the zeal of the
convert, all of Morse’s releases have dealt with Christianity in one form or
another, and Morse, using every skill he learned before and during his time in
Spock’s Beard, has done his best to baptize and sanctify the genre of
progressive rock. If Wilson is a bit of a mischievous trickster figure, Morse
is the Chestertonian fool, the man who gives his all to God, indifferent to the
standards of the world and content to be judged only by his Maker. The world
sees him as the fool, but he is, in actuality, a sort of Jeremiah.
Christian Prog
Morse’s first solo album
after his conversion,
Testimony,
movingly tells the story of his life and his conversion to Christianity. As he
always had, he employed almost any possible style of music in the revelation of
his own revelation. Most notably, however, Morse incorporates for the first
time in any of his music what might be termed as Pentecostal-style “praise and
worship” music on
Testimony.
Not only does this work, it works beautifully. The lyrics, typically for
Morse, are as insightful as they are humorous and honestly self-deprecating.
Regarding his skepticism but
hoping to find grace, Morse describes his first real time in a church:
Old
time religion filled the air
The
preacher said you’re saved
by
faith and not by works
I
thought ‘that’s good
‘cause
I haven’t worked in a year.’
Presumably having accepted a
personal relationship with Christ, Morse sings,
Sing
it high, sing it low
Sing
it everywhere you go
Jesus
will deliver you from suffering
He’s
the way, he’s the goal
He’s
the song in your soul
Listen
with your spirit and you’ll hear it ring.
In the background, a preacher
preaches and a choir praises. Appalachian fiddles are plucked and fiddled, and
Morse plays his spirited guitar with a southern, country twang. After a
confession of love for the congregation and its love of Christ, Morse offers
ejaculations of holiness, and the music becomes nothing less than a full-blown
barn dance as the protagonist is saved. It would be nearly impossible to hear
the music without wanting to rejoice in Morse’s discovery.
Mark Ptak, keyboardist of the
New Jersey-based prog band, Advent, explains Morse’s appeal:
Mr. Morse courageously sticks to his guns, trying to provide an
uplifting and positive Christian message in his material at the risk of much
negative press and criticism. But at the base of it, really, his is a motive
that's truly one of love - not just for God, as that's clear enough in his
delivery, but love for the listener as well. It's a selfless attitude that's
not always easy to apply in the process of creating any music, much less rock.
In that way, your efforts are transformed and take on a whole new quality. And
I believe it makes a big difference on some non-visceral level during the
listening experience. Unfortunately, that idea gets lost or is wholly absent
from the debates on Neal's exciting music.
Ptak, a practicing Roman
Catholic and a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music, is right.
The music, as well as the lyrics, creates a definite empathy on the part of the
listener. Morse’s voice and music are so in earnest that one cannot help but
respect and admire his convictions.
Testimony would not be Morse’s last autobiographical
statement of conversion. As he has admitted, his 2009 album with the
progressive rock supergroup, Transatlantic,
The Whirlwind, is a testimony as well and he also released
Testimony 2 in the spring of
2011. As with
Testimony, the
sequel is a deeply personal album, filled with all types and styles of music,
and presenting even greater details about his conversion and, as he sees it,
God’s role in shaping his own life, family, and career. Perhaps the most
interesting and creative song Morse ever wrote is “Time Changer,” a tune
recollecting his time in Spock’s Beard. Several members of the old band even
make guest vocal appearances. The song is at once complicated and catchy, with
a myriad of voices singing in and around one another, a throbbing bass holding
the song together and an electric violin giving the entire musical moment a
Kansas-like or Jean-Luc Ponty prog feel.
The story of
Testimony 2, though, involves the miraculous healing of his
daughter, Jayda, born with a defective heart. After considerable prayer and
Morse’s wife presenting their daughter to God as a gift on Mothers’ Day, 1998,
her heart problems completely disappeared, and she remains perfectly healthy to
this day. “When He healed my daughter,” Morse stated in 2011 in an interview
with Hope Unlimited, “I began to be transformed from being angry with God to
being grateful.”
Only two weeks before
Testimony 2 came out, Morse also released
his written autobiography through his company, Radiant Records. Also called
Testimony, the book is nearly impossible to put down once begun. Not
surprisingly, Morse is as genuinely funny, self-deprecating, and sincere as his
music and lyrics would suggest. Long gone are the near madness and rage of
“The Light.” Instead, Morse has found happiness, calm, and steadiness in his
life.
He relates his own journey to
Christ through a series of flashbacks and vignettes. As Morse constructs the
narrative of his life, it becomes clear to the reader that God had been guiding
and encouraging him all along, yet also allowing him to fail and discover for
himself that he was not always the master of his life as he so strongly
desired.
Never does Morse shy away
from the sins of his former life, but never does he dwell on them in a lewd or
prideful manner. Morse’s response is almost always the same: here’s what I
did; I was an idiot; it took me forever to discover I could not work this
problem out; I surrendered myself to God; and God worked it out.
Never does the narrative
fail. Morse has an instinctive notion of what makes a story work, and the
autobiography is especially effective when he tells stories about interesting
characters he’s met in his life and the ways in which he perceived them and
they him. If there’s a weakness in the book, it is that Morse tries too often
to follow the model of a sermon or homily. He tells a story, concluding each
major portion of his life with a lesson drawn from scripture. The lessons
sometimes comes across as redundant and the scriptural references forced. This
is simply a matter of editing, and a second edition of this book can integrate
all of this in a much more artful manner. Morse has proven his ability to
interconnect such ideas numerous times in his lyrics and music, and he’ll
readily be able to do the same in a second edition of
Testimony. This is, however, a very minor quip, and it should not discourage
anyone from reading this excellent autobiography.
Theological Prog
In addition to his several
albums--solo and with Transatlantic--giving various details of his own life and
conversion, Morse has also engaged Christian history and doctrine in several of
his other solo albums, all written and produced since his conversion.
In 2004, Morse released
One, an album that explains the separation of man
from God through man’s own choice and his exile from the Garden of Eden. The
album rocks rather heavily, and especially good is the eighteen-minute track,
“The Separated Man,” a song that grasps through the very structure of the music
itself the extent to which man has wounded himself and Creation. With
middle-eastern flavors and significant distortion and dissonance, Morse
presents man at his most arrogant, building his own Tower of Babel. As with
Genesis 3:15, though, “One” ends with the hope presented by God offering a
messiah and making the evil of the fall into something profoundly good and
better than the original.
“Listening through even a
single one of his tracks reflects the contemplation and awe with which one
might survey a stunning vista, panorama, or plateau,” classically-trained prog
fan Joe Hersey reflects. “God’s love is simple and elegantly plain, yes, but He
is also majestic and beautifully intricate in His creation and relationship to
man.”
(Question Mark) (sic; yes, this is the title of his 2006 album!)
explains the significance of the Tabernacle and the Temple, especially their
Hebraic history in the Old Testament and their connections to Christ in the New
Testament. While Morse focuses on the specifically Christ-type elements of the
tabernacle, as opposed to a Catholic Marian interpretation,
(Question Mark) is as theologically sound as it is thrilling in
its very progginess.
Morse’s 2008 album,
Lifeline, though not specifically a concept album,
presents a number of common themes, especially the notions of free will and
predestination. At what point does God allow man to ruin his life and world?
Most interestingly, Morse also tackles the issue of politics from a Christian
standpoint. His piece, “Leviathan,” is, as he openly admits, one of the
weirdest songs he has written. True to form, again with a masterful touch,
Morse creates a song that in body and soul represents what Leviathan must be
musically. “From Pharaoh to Caesar he grew his blood boiling/Out of the depths
of the sea comes Leviathan,” the singer cries, drowning in dissonance. “How
many heads will there be on Leviathan,” he poignantly asks.
In and around these solo
albums, Morse continues to record with Transatlantic, and he has released a
number of live albums of his solo work as well as a series of gospel rock
albums. With Mike Portnoy, he has made several CDs covering favorite songs and
bands, and he has recently formed yet another progressive rock band, Flying
Colors, releasing its first album this year as well.
Morse seems to possess the
energy of three or four men. For those who love prog who once worried about
Morse quitting the genre after his conversion in 2002, there can be no doubt
that his conversion has only increased his productivity and his artistry.
Problems with “Papism”
For a Roman Catholic, and
even apparently for some evangelicals, the problematic album is the one Morse
released in 2007, titled
Sola Scriptura. A full and progful-retelling of the story of Martin Luther in four
songs, clocking in at 76 minutes, Morse not only praises Luther, but he also
attacks the Catholic Church in a number of different ways, not just at the time
of the Reformation but before and even through the present-day. “If you think
the whore is only history/Are there those who teach her lies?/Wherever they
believe what came out from her/That same spirit is still alive.” While Morse
does not identify the “same spirit” corrupting the Church as the Catholic
Church, it is clear from the four songs themselves that Morse believes this to
be true. In other lines, he sings: “But spiritual captivity it still is
around us/I believe the time has come to stand up and to cry/Come out of
her--There’s a place where your spirit can fly/Come out of her my people/MY
PEOPLE! Not just from the Mother but the daughters of the harlot/Everything
that comes from her it must be left behind/Her rituals and teaching smells of
death and bloody scarlet.”
In his liner notes, Morse
apologizes for defending Luther despite the German Reformer’s blatant
anti-Semitism but he, significantly and tellingly, offers no such apology to Roman
Catholics.
My
purpose in making this album is to open people’s eyes to the idea that the
church that started out in the full light (‘I am the light of the world’, ‘Ye
are the light of the world’) went into darkness and is now in the process of
coming back into the light. When I wrote this album I was unaware of Martin
Luther’s anti-Jewish statements, and I considered scrapping it, but I feel that
the main point is that the way God used him to protest false religion is still
a good example of courage and boldness for a Godly cause. Also, I am not
trying to point to only one church that needs to be reformed, but rather that
we should ALL look at the scriptures afresh to see what truth God wants to
restore in THIS generation! If Luther brought back salvation by faith; the
Wesleys brought sanctification, and the Pentecostals restored the baptism of
the Holy Ghost, what is there for US to restore? Remember, the latter house
shall be greater than the former!
After this, several
evangelicals at
Christianity
Today distanced themselves from Morse
a bit. Because of my own love of the Catholic Church as well as my deep and
profound appreciation of the artistry of Neal Morse, I have written an open
letter to him. I do this not because I condone Morse’s ideas on Catholicism,
but because from everything I have seen of him, he is a sincere man, and I
believe with a bit more searching, he will discover that Protestants and
Catholics are allies, not enemies.
An open letter to Neal Morse
Dear Mr. Morse,
I’ve been happily and
joyously following your career since
The Light came out. At the time, I was thrilled to find
someone embracing as well as advancing the prog genre. As you well know, the
1980s were a dry period for prog. Your art has been a significant presence in
my life for nearly two decades. My wife and I rejoiced when you embraced your
new life in faith, and gave thanks that you were blessed with a daughter. My
kids and I have danced to and memorized almost all of
Testimony (for some reason, they call Part III the “Batman
Song”), and we have watched you in concert many times. We’ll be seeing you
live in Chicago in October.
When you rereleased
The
Light, I sympathized with your
warning “Clear the kids out before you put this one on!” My kids have never
heard this, nor do I plan on them hearing it anytime soon.
Sadly, though, I could (and
do) make the same warning for Track 1/Part IV and Track 4/Part IV of your
album,
Sola Scriptura. The
music, as always, is simply stunning. But, your condemnation of the Roman
Catholic Church as the Whore, the Mother and the “Daughters of a Harlot” are
deeply troubling and saddening.
While I would agree that many
Catholics—even popes—caused harm and scandal in the late 15th and
early 16th centuries (my intellectual mentor, Russell Kirk, called Pope
Alexander VI a monster of avarice and lust) I also know that the Church has
done much to make amends for such failures and has spent the last five hundred
years promoting the love of Christ in opposition to the forces of the world.
I would very respectfully ask
you to reconsider your position on the Catholic Church. Please read Pope Paul
III’s 1545 letter of apology to Protestants; the decree of the Council of Trent
on Justification (which emphasizes the centrality of Christ and grace); any
single thing written by Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI, or any novel by
Michael O’Brien. According to Catholic teaching, all Christians--Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox--are brothers, though separated.
All I ask, Mr. Morse, is that
you reconsider your lyrics and recognize your allies for what and who they are.
From everything you’ve done, pre-and post-your new life, it’s clear you seek
the truth in humility. It’s one of the things I admire and always have about
you. In its theology, the Catholic Church argues that man is saved by (and
only by) grace alone. As the Catechism of the
Catholic Church states, “Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace
is
favor, the
free and
undeserved help that God gives us
to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of
the divine nature and of eternal life” (par 1996). In this, at least, I hope we
can agree.
As always, thank you for your
witness of artistry, excellence, beauty, and integrity. Regardless of what you
decide, I will happily enjoy your Chicago show with my wife and two other
Catholic friends in October. We wish you only happiness, in this world and the
next.
Yours, sincerely,
Brad
Conclusion
As I write this article,
Morse is on tour with Flying Colors. Once again, though, one project is never
enough for Morse, as his latest solo album,
Momentum, comes out on September 11, 2012. Yet again, it
is a work of intense artistry. It is also one of Morse’s most interesting
albums, lyrically and musically. Not a concept in the way several of his other
albums are,
Momentum most
resembles his penultimate album with Spock’s Beard, “V.” As with its 2000
counterpart,
Momentum has six
songs. The first five are eight minutes or less long, with the last song being
a 34-minute epic.
With skill and passion,
Morse’s new album considers the pace of modernity and our reactions to it, the
necessity of appearing deep in conversation, how to weather deception in this
world, how one interprets his calling in the world, and the way a powerful
spiritual figure would be perceived should he arrive bodily in the present day
(I’ll leave it for the reader to discover the identity of the protagonist in
the track, “Freak,” as Morse deftly leaves the identity a mystery until the
very end of the song) in his shorter tunes.
The epic is, well, epic. As
the title, “World without End,” suggests, the thirty-four minutes explore the
motivations of a person, and especially whether he or she is trying to shape
the ephemeral or the permanent and timeless.
While the songs are as
Christian as anything else Morse has written since 2002, they are presented in
a more artful, less evangelical “in your face” sort of way. No longer driven
with the zeal of a convert or with the anger of a younger man, Morse has
reached a point where his faith and the ideas surrounding Christianity have
simply and comfortably become a part of his very view of the world and his
place within it.
Whatever one might think of
Morse’s particular theological views, I can state this with absolute assurance:
Morse moves me in every way, as a person and as an artist. When I listen to
him or read him, I want to enjoy that same kind of personal relationship he has
with Christ; I want to be a better father and better husband; I want to be a
better person and citizen. In this world of sorrows, what more can we ask of
our heroes? Especially when they use every single gift they have been given to
make the world just a bit better, while asking us to follow them into eternity.
Morse’s story is truly the
story of
sola gratia.
•
Neal Morse's official website
