No Hill For A Climber

The new album by Neal Morse & The Resonance – entitled No Hill For A Climber from a resonant line in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead – has its roots at the end of 2023, as Morse explains: “I started thinking about what I was going to do in 2024,  and my wife suggested that I should think about doing something with the amazingly talented younger guys that we have here locally – like Chris Riley, Andre Madatian and Philip Martin. I knew just how good they were from playing with them at our Christmas concerts and other events.” One of the benefits – Morse soon realised – of working with local young talent was a sense of newness and immediacy: “These guys brought a lot to the table. There is a freshness that comes from working with new and younger people. There are some musical ideas they brought that would NEVER have occurred to me: there is lots of new stuff here.”