Alan Morse’s scorching guitar has led Spock’s Beard over the past three decades through various incarnations of the band. His unique style of playing and performing has been a cornerstone of the band. During that time, he has only released one solo album of his own, the excellent jazz fusion album Four O’Clock and Hysteria. Considering that it was an all-instrumental album, it comes as a surprise that his new solo album, So Many Words, is a collection of vocal pieces largely sung by Morse himself.
After years of hearing that a new solo record was close, Morse talks about it like a finished thing that had to wait its turn. The delay was not mysterious, but simply messy. “All kinds of weird things happened,” he says, and part of it came down to conversations that stalled out. “There was a label we were talking to that might have put it out, but then that didn’t happen.” He describes a record that sat completed while the timing refused to line up: “It’s been really in the can for quite a while, but just scheduling just didn’t quite work out.”
Even with the album basically done, he kept working. “We tweaked a few things over the past year, but it’s pretty close to what it was a year ago.” Then he points to one late addition that changed the feel of the finish line. “Added some awesome, like, did a big gospel choir thing on the last song on ‘Behind Me.’ And that came out amazing. A couple of awesome singers came in and we just stacked it all up and made a huge choir.” For Morse, it was the kind of extra push that paid back the patience: “It makes it worth the wait.”
Morse has sung lead before in the Spock’s Beard world, even if most fans remember him first as a guitarist. “A couple of times,” he says. “There are a few of them where Ted’s, I wrote it, and Ted sounds a lot like me, but it’s actually him.” Then he reaches for one deep cut: “There was like, maybe it was like a bonus track called ‘A Moth of Many Flames,’ I think. I think I sang lead on that.”
Taking the mic for most of So Many Words brought a mix of nerves and pride. When asked how it feels to be the lead vocalist across the record, he does not pick one emotion. “Kind of all of the above,” he says. Then he gets specific about where he feels the payoff. “I think the vocals came out great. And some of it, I mean, I’m super proud of.”
Collaborating with top-notch musicians like Simon Phillips and Tony Levin, and Spock’s alumni Nick D’Virgilio, Jimmy Keegan, and Ted Leonard, Morse also brings in his son and daughter to join him on a couple of pieces. Of course, brother Neal Morse is included in the mix, sharing some lead vocal and co-writing credits. But this is very much Alan Morse’s own creation, with him stretching out further than ever before.
One of the biggest moments for Alan is the track he did with his brother. “There’s a big vocal extravaganza on the song that I do with Neal. It’s called ‘In the Shadow of the Sun.’” And he keeps coming back to the same reaction when he hears it back. “Every time I hear that, it just kicks my ass. I mean, I just think it sounds amazing. I’m so, so proud of how that came out.” He also flags another vocal performance that surprised him: “There’s this one called, ‘And It’s Time’ that I really like,” and later, “The vocals, I think, just came out. I’m kind of amazed that I could do that.”
There is also a clean line from the Spock’s Beard camp to this solo album. “Ted Leonard sings lead on one song, too, with all the Spocks guys,” he says. That track has its own backstory. “We actually recorded it,” he explains. “And for one reason or another, it just never ended up on a Spock‘s record. And so I thought, you know, I’ll just put it on myself, my own record, because I think it’s a great song.”
He even calls his shot on why it lands. “Jimmy Keegan just kills on that record, on that song,” he says, then zooms in on a very specific instruction he gave Keegan: “There’s one part where I said, ‘OK, dude, play just like Keith Moon, you know, play like Keith Moon.’ And he’s just perfect. He just nails it. It sounds just like Keith Moon.”
When the conversation lands on Tony Levin, it comes back to timing and modern collaboration. “If we could get anybody, who would we want? Oh, I’d love to just have Tony on it. And he was into it.” The limitation was his schedule. “He was getting ready to go on tour with Peter Gabriel, and so his schedule was a little tight. So he could only do the one song.” They did not track in the same room. “We just sent him the tracks, and he sent us back the thing. So I didn’t actually get to hang out with him.” Still, the reverence is obvious when he flashes back to the first time he saw Levin live. “He’s always been one of my heroes ever since I saw him. And the first time he toured with King Crimson, they came out with Adrian and him.” Then he sums it up the way fans do when they run out of adjectives: “I saw them in a little club in Hollywood, and it was just magic.”
The record also leans into texture, which is where Morse has always been sneaky-good. When the interviewer calls out the title track’s bouzouki, mandolin, and electric sitar touches, Morse explains the mindset. “I like, you know, throwing all the different instruments and stuff, because that’s fun,” he says, and he ties it directly to his own standards: “I like to try to do something different every time, you know, something that I haven’t heard already.”
If there is a downside to all of this for fans in the U.S., he calls it straight. “I’d love to play some U.S. gigs,” he says, then lays out the problem: “Art touring is pretty hard in America. It’s so spread out.” Even one show can turn into a grind. “You fly all the way to, I don’t know, New York, and do one gig and then turn around and fly back. It’s kind of rough.” He still talks like someone looking for a workable angle: “Maybe we can figure something out. It would be cool to at least do a West Coast thing or something, maybe or an East Coast kind of deal.”
And because Morse never sounds like someone who only has one gear, the interview veers into one of his other obsessions: the Cyclotron, spelled “with a P-S-Y-C-H.” He describes it with the excitement of a guy showing you a new pedal or a weird instrument. “It’s super fun,” he says. “Anybody can play with it. You don’t have to be an artist, but you can make amazing-looking animations, and you can play with it, and it’s low-tech.” Then he gives the best part, the part that explains why it is hard to describe in plain text. “There are no screens, no computers,” he says. “It involves a large turntable,” and when you hit it right, “you kind of hit it with a blacklight strobe, and the stuff starts to animate, and it looks, it’ll just blow your mind.”
That is the thread running through So Many Words. A long wait, a lot of detail, a lot of voices, and a lot of moments where Alan Morse sounds genuinely surprised by how strong the final result came out.
