Issue 2024-084

Béla Alabástrom

First of all, many thanks for agreeing to talk to DPRP. It's a real pleasure.

Oh, well thanks for caring.

Could I start by congratulating you on your new album, No Hill for a Climber? It's truly amazing. I'm a huge fan of Transatlantic, and in some ways, it reminded me of Bridge Across Forever. Would you say that's a fair comparison?

Well, I think I mentioned that in the press release. What I mean is, you know, kind of structurally, it's a little bit like that in the way that I think Bridge Across Forever starts off with Duel With The Devil. Is that the first thing on there? Well, it's like the two big acts, and with shorter songs in between kind of thing.

There's quite a few albums I've done that have that kind of structure. But music is necessarily exactly like that. There's a lot of the same influences. I mean, I am one of the primary writers on, I guess, both of those records. I'm glad you really like it. That's the main thing.

It's really great. Could you tell us about what inspired the title of the new album?

We had done our first exploratory, sort of jam sessions, you might say, me and the guys that are in The Resonance. We got together in January and in February.

We were going out to see our daughter in Colorado. She's home now, but she was living in Colorado. She and her husband were living there.

So I was in Colorado and reading a book called Demon Copperhead. It had this line in the book, I read, "No Hill for a Climber". It's mentioned four times in this book. I'd never heard that phrase before.

And I thought, "Oh, interesting phrase!" And I started sort of singing in my mind, like, right there on the airplane. I started to, let's see, "No Hill for a Climber".

I started to find this chorus, No Hill, right there on the plane. So I didn't want to lose it. So I got up and away from people as much as possible, on board the airplane, singing into my phone.

So I sang that chorus idea into my phone. That's where that all sort of started. But that flight, man, it brought a lot of fruit, because I sat back down, and I kept reading, and then I started to hear one of the main themes from No Hill as well.

So I got up again, and I was walking around singing into my phone. My wife asked me later, "What was going on with you on that flight, man? You were just getting up!" I was inspired. The flight was awesome.

One prominent aspect of your body of work has been your collaborations with many gifted musicians. Could you tell us about how you got together with The Resonance?

It was towards the end of 2023. I was talking to my wife about having no idea really what to do progressive rock-wise in 2024. I had some other things I was going to do. I knew Flying Colors were going to play on Cruise To The Edge.

I knew that I had the Late Bloomer singer/songwriter album that I was going to be releasing because I was already working on it. But as far as like a new rock record, I didn't know what I was going to be doing. I did have a solo deal with Inside Out. You know, when you sign a record deal, a lot of times it's a three-album deal, shall we say. They have the option to put out three albums anyway. They don't have to do it, but they did want a solo album. I think I remember saying "I've just done these two Joseph albums with so much work, and I'm pretty much doing them by myself". You know, I had a lot of help from players and singers, but as far as producing it and writing it, it was all on me.

And so I didn't really want to make some kind of progressive rock record by myself. I just wasn't up for it. So she suggested, "Well, what if you were to try to do something with some of these local guys?", you know, some of the guys that I've played with in my church and also at other events and various things.

So, yes, really she was the one that planted the seed. I thought about it and prayed and thought, yes, I should do that. I still wasn't convinced, you know, for me, I have to like kind of put my toe in the water, get in the water a little bit and see if I'm comfortable in it, you know, and so that's what, those January sessions were about.

I think we got together twice and I felt really good about it. I felt the Lord in it. That was how that started. I was glad that they all wanted to do it. I feel like it's been blessed, and you can hear that on the album.

Yes, I think you definitely can. Could you tell us a little bit about the individual band members? This is so new that people won't know about them.

Right. OK, yes. Andre Madatian. Let's see, I've known him for I think about 10 years. The woman that he married is my wife's friend. Andre is a professional musician in Nashville, also a music teacher at MTSU University. So he's a really great guitar player and also orchestrator. He writes for the orchestra. He writes his own kind of classical music. Really great guy, plays with a lot of pretty big country artists. He played stadiums over the summer because he was playing with a female country artist Raelynn. He played at the really famous stadium where some baseball team plays. I should know the name of it! It would be like playing at Wembley in London or something, it's a very famous place. I just can't remember the name of it. But anyway, that's Andre.

Philip Martin played drums on much of the album. I've known him, I think, since he was born because his parents and my wife and I are friends and go to the same church. He's been around a long time, in church together, and then as he developed, he's been playing percussion like timpani and tabalas and all kinds of things at Morsefest for the last four years; he's been doing that, and he's also been out on tour. He's also done drum tech work for my boy. So he's been around the block a time or two.

Chris Riley is a very creative guy. I've known him for almost 10 years as well now. I met him first at Morsefest as a fan. I think he was moving here. He went to Belmont University, which is in Nashville, and he started to come out to different events and I got to know him and he started to attend the Radiant School. He's been at all the Radiant Schools and I heard a bunch of his demos and was like, "Wow!" I mean, he was definitely a standout student at school. When I was thinking about doing this with some talented progressive rock people locally, I definitely thought of him.

Then there is Joe Ganzelli. Joe is a friend of Andre's. What happened was Philip was playing drums at all the sessions and was going to be the drummer. He and his brother, they went on Cruise To The Edge to be helpers and technicians for Flying Colors. Well, Steve Morse was so in with Philip that they invited Philip to go on tour as a tech for the Dixie Dregs, as they were touring in April. Philip said, "Oh, by the way, I'm leaving on April 14th to go on tour with Steve Morse". I thought, "Oh, well, we're not going to have the drums done by then. Oh, my!" And Andre suggested bringing his friend Joe in, whom I'd only met like once or twice before. He came in and just did a lot of great drum work also.

Johnny Bisaha came in late on. Johnny's the only one of the Resonance guys that I didn't already know. I was hearing a lot of high singing on these songs, you know, Ever Interceding and No Hill For A Climber and other things. I had been putting out there's and I talked to a couple of singers, but nothing ever panned out.

In fact, one guy said that he was going to come over and just was a no call, no show. It was all the way to the end of April to deliver the album in May. That's when Gabe Klein gave me Johnny's phone number and I called him up. He came over the next day, I think.

I asked him if he could hit a sustained high B, and he hit a B for me. So I said, "OK, you know, come back next week". He did all his parts and sang all the songs on the album in two days, I think, in the following week. What a find! What a thing to just have happened kind of at the last minute. That's one of the ways that I know that God is really in something. He's really got something when stuff like that happens that you're just like, wow! It's just perfect. He is such a great guy, too. He's so enthusiastic and happy to be involved, you know, just has a great attitude, as well as being such a talented singer. That's that's a quick rundown on who these guys are and how I know them.

Neal Morse (promo photo by Levi Pippin)

The video for All The Rage has got a very relaxed jamming session vibe. Could you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and recording of that song and the album?

Well, let's see. So we got together for those exploratory writing sessions. I left in February and when I came back, I had to get ready for Cruise To The Edge in March. We're going to set aside April to make this album. During that time, I was writing quite a bit. I think we had a couple more writing sessions scattered throughout February, March. We were exploring different things. We wrote some of the music in the video together in the room.

There's three sections that Chris Riley wrote. Two of them he had before, sections from his demos that I just loved. You know, these two sections in Eternity In Your Eyes that were actually flown into the main sections from Chris's demo. The third is the Burn It Down section of the Hill track, which I think is really cool, because it's so different. I love it. That comes in because that's not what I have done at all. That's what you want the other people in the group to do: take the music to places where you wouldn't take it, where you wouldn't go.

Then we wrote some of the music together and I probably wrote, oh, I don't know, 50% of the album or so by myself. But I was writing it in February and March and April, some with the guys. When we got together in April, I think most of the structure was in place, and we started to work out the last bits of structure for the pieces.

Then we started to really get down to work recording the drum tracks, the drums and bass generally come first. I made stems, which is like little tracks of a keyboard stem, a drum stem. It was all the scratch tracks at first that I sent to Andre and Chris, who then did quite a bit of work at their own home studios.

They did some tracking at their home studios and then either sent or brought me files. Then we got together again. You know, we spent maybe three days, three or four days on electric guitar with just me and Andre. Some of the other guys would come to help kick around ideas while the vocals were going down, too.

We finally got it all in there by around mid-May, which is when we delivered the master to be mixed.

I think there's a genuine vitality and drive to the music on the album. Having worked with The Resonance, do you feel optimistic about the future of prog?

I do. Yes, I do. These guys are all really musical. They're young and they're super talented. It's very encouraging and really cool to see that. It's also encouraging to be on the Cruise To The Edge and hear all the great music from the younger bands and see the younger guys that are there. There were a lot of really good musicians there, a lot of good younger musicians on the cruise. That's also very encouraging.

Going back to Johnny's vocals for a moment in some of the songs, as you mentioned, such as Ever Interceding, his vocals come to the fore to amazing effect. Do you feel that nurturing younger musicians and allowing them to shine in the way that he does on the album is an important aspect of what you do?

Oh, well, I want it to be. It's kind of a new thing for me, you know? And for somebody who works alone a lot, like I collaborate with people, but usually only like with Transatlantic, we'll get together for maybe a week to 10 days and write and come up with material a for an album. We go to our respective studios and work alone pretty much. So it's great. It's a stretch for me, a challenge for me to try to figure out how to help other people get the best performance that's in them. That's really the producer's role. I don't know if it was something that came really naturally to me, I have to kind of stretch myself to do it and to be the encourager. It was really fun making this album with these guys.

Thief, I think, is a standout track on the album. It's got a sort of jazzy, almost cabaret like feel to it in places, which makes it really very different to anything we've heard before. How would you describe it?

My grandson likes funny music, weird stuff. I always share funny songs with him and I shared with him this idea that I had while I was sleeping: you'd sing "Thieves!" and then sing this stuff in between. He looked at me and said, "Wow, grandpa, you're crazy!" Yes, that was where it started.

I really liked the idea. So I wrote the beginning. I wrote it more with the feel of maybe Fever, that old Peggy Lee song. It sort of had a feel like that to it. I came up with the next section, the sort of shuffle section, where we are saying "Everything you touch turns into life". So I had the first section and then going into the second section, I really liked it. But then I was stuck. I didn't know where to go. I tried a lot of different instrumental passages and things.

I knew I wanted to do something really intense. I knew I wanted it to peak out and, and then go "Thief!" again, I knew that. But I just couldn't get there.

So I called up Chris Riley, who lives local. By the way, it is the great thing about having people local. It's a Monday night, and I'm kind of stuck on this piece. "Hey, you want to come over and listen to this? See if you can help me". You know, he came over, and he had the idea to go into that middle section. The rest is history. I think it just came out. Just really, really great.

The only other thing I'll say about Thief is one of the reasons why I think it came out as cool as it did, is because it was Joe Ganzelli, the drummer, who came up with the idea of hip hop groove for the whole beginning part. You know, he plays a very different groove that I didn't even really understand how it fit when he first started playing it. I was like, "Whoa!" So yeah, I think I really acknowledge hats off to Joe, because I think he really made the song.

Video still

Do you have a favourite track on the album?

Yeah, Thief is my favourite short one, and No Hill for a Climber is my favourite long one. Although I loved listening to Eternity In Your Eyes, too.

One of the reasons is because I love Chris Riley's sections. You know, I've heard my voice a lot. It's fun for me to hear his voice, also the way Rich Mauser mixed it and put Chris's voice through a Leslie. Man, I love that one, too.

Would you consider touring with The Resonance or incorporating a performance with them into Morsefest?

It's certainly possible. It's something that we haven't talked about. I'm busy. I'm finishing an album that I started over the summer with Chester Thompson from Genesis and Phil Keaggy. I've got to get ready for Morsefest, doing all of both Joseph parts one and two and Jesus Christ The Exorcist and a trio set. So I've got my hands full till Christmas. Even beyond because Morsefest London is in January. So I'm not going to start thinking about something like that.

One of the defining features of your body of work is its profound spirituality, with your musical and spiritual journeys being inextricably intertwined. And I think No Hill For A Climber is not an exception to that. What would you say the main message of the album is?

Oh, well, it's not a concept album, so it isn't really saying one thing. But yes, I think all the pieces have a sort of element of, you know, that God will deliver you. You know, the message of No Hill For A Climber, in the end, is with God, all things are possible. There is no hill too high, that you won't be able to climb with Him, no challenge too great. So I would say that that pretty much sums up the main thrust of the album.

I found it very uplifting. It has a real message of hope in it.

Well, yes, good. I'm glad to hear that. We always want to be giving that because we believe in that. All of these lyrics and things are coming from the inside. I'm hoping that something of what I feel on the inside is coming through. I want people to feel uplifted. I think progressive rock is such a great vehicle for these kinds of spiritual journeys. Because you can really express the mountaintop stuff. You can express the despair alley, and all the different things that we go through in life, the conflict, the anger, all the things that we go through, all the different spaces, you can express it in music. I'm so thankful to be able to get to do that.

And you do such a wonderful job. All of your fans are extremely grateful to you for that.

Thank you. That's very kind.

Could I ask one final, slightly off-topic question?

Sure.

Will there perhaps be a Transatlantic reunion at some stage?

That I do not know, you know, I always say "Never say never!" Like you don't know really what the future holds. But certainly not for quite a while. I mean, Mike is back with Dream Theater and, you know, doing great. So anything involving him will be put on the back burner for quite a while. So we've got time to think about that.

Okay. Well, as you say, "Never say never". We can hope. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to DPRP and good luck with all the other interviews.

Thank you, thank you. You have a good time. Appreciate it.