Modern prog without Neal Morse wouldn’t be the same. I found out about him quite early through his strong relation with Mike Portnoy, who had opened up the door to the prog world for me. I was probably around 16 when I got my first Spock’s Beard album – ‘The Light’. Oh wow… I really enjoyed the epics and the musical complexity on this album. The edition I had, had some liner notes with it from Neal where he would feel sorry for using the f-word in ‘The Water’ from a later perspective, which must have been after he became such a strongly religious man. Before finishing school, I bought another Spock’s Beard record – ‘V’ – from a local record store and I loved it just the same. Whenever I needed inspiration, e.g. for a homework in arts class, these two were the records I’d play.

As fantastic as those two albums were to me, for a long time I didn’t dig any deeper in the Morse universe. At some point, I got myself a copy of Transatlantic’s ‘The Whirlwind’ – which I loved – and of Neal’s earlier solo record ‘Sola Scriptura’. But I didn’t like the latter at all for the religious lyrics. I was raised christian and I was still a member of protestant church by the time, so Martin Luthers story as a prog album should’ve been OK for me. But for some reason, I thought that ‘proper prog music’ wasn’t supposed to have ‘worship-vibes’ to it, it felt kind of cheesy to me.

Then Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater… and I wasn’t happy at all with what he had come up with afterwards. So basically, besides Steven Wilson and Opeth, my focus went from contemporary prog to the classics for a few years. At some point in 2015, I stumbled upon the video for ‘The Grand Experiment’ by ‘The Neal Morse Band’ on Facebook, which had Portnoy on drums but I didn’t really like the song. Only years later, in 2019/20, when they had already released their two landmark albums ‘The Similitude of a Dream’, which is now an all-time favourite of mine, and ‘The Great Adventure’, the Neal Morse universe finally got me. I don’t even recall a certain moment or a certain song, it just happened. I think it had a lot to do with where I was as a musician by the time and how many parallels there were with Neal Morse. Not for the religious aspect of his works, but for being the mastermind and multi-instrumentalist he is and how he usually creates concept albums – just like me.

Today, Neal is one of my biggest musical heroes. He excels at melodies, harmonies, storytelling, arrangement so much, I couldn’t help but dream of doing what he does – except without the religious aspect, which nowadays is totally fine to me. I must have outgrown from the rather narrow minded opinions of the younger me and changed them into a deep respect for his ambition of embracing the cultural heritage of Christianity through his music. You could compare this ambition to what must have driven Richard Wagner during the creation of his ‘Ring’ – some kind of (positive) megalomania. For my third album, ‘A Wandering Mind’, the inspiration I got from Neal was more than the above mentioned aspects, though. For the first time, I did the vocals myself and I dared to touch a very personal topic in the lyrics. Both of these things combined made a very big step for my identity as a musician and his works truly inspired me to this daring, because he dares to do the same!

Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth once said that as a musician, you are always a product of your record collection. I would like to expand this to the people behind the music, who sometimes play just as an important role as their music itself.