Bands
ex- Spocks Beard

Featured on
Ayreon - The Dream Sequencer

Audio
The First Man on Earth

Website
Neal Morse's Official Website

Neal Morse - vocals

Arjen explains:

From the first time I heard the masterful progband Spock's Beard I knew that at some point in time I wanted to work with the singer. I went to their show and afterwards I just walked up to Neal and gave him an Ayreon CD with a letter. Fortunately he loved my music and I recorded his voice in LA. Neal has a slightly breathy, melodic voice with a limited range but a tremendous amount of expression. Neal is a super talented man, you don't have to tell him anything and he is constantly overflowing with ideas. He wrote part of the lyrics and even during recording changed and made up new lyrics. It is too bad that he quit Spock's Beard, although I'm sure we haven't heard the last from him yet.

Neal explains:

Arjen came to a gig in Holland, one of our first there, and gave me this huge CD which turned out to be Into the Electric Castle. There are a lot of people at shows who give me CDs of their stuff, so I didn't think much of it at the time. When I listened to it at first I was puzzled by the Science Fiction thing at the beginning. Then, once I got into the CD, I loved it!!

He sent me a demo CD (which sounded almost like the record!), I learned the melody and wrote some words for it of my own, then we set a time when we could do it at a studio in LA, and in two hours it was done. Maybe three. I thought he was great to work with. He was very pro and seemed to like what I was doing..... it was very cool.