Though lacking a formal “altar call”, Morse’s concerts resemble Pentecostal tent revivals as much as they do traditional live rock performances. 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.Īs Morse admitted in his autobiography, Testimony (Radiant, 2011), the mission field has been rather dry, but it has not been without some success. To make Morse and his reputation even more interesting, he has become an important, if unusual, Christian evangelist for our time.

And, as an epic, it needs to be 78 minutes long. The New Jerusalem arrives, catching most citizens of the Earth unaware. It tells the story of a modern culture willfully ignorant of Christianity. Every aspect of the release matters for a prog artist, and the genre tends to attract an inordinate number of perfectionists.Īs 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.Īs well it should.

Neal morse website