Neal - Good! How are you?
Kim - I'm doing good. Let me tell you first off that I really enjoyed One.
Neal - Oh thank you.
Kim - But I must admit that it caused a personal dilemma because I can't decide if I like "Author of Confusion" or "Cradle to the Grave" better.
Neal - (laughs) They are quite different aren't they? That's funny because this is the first album that I've made that my son Will has really "gotten". He enjoyed Testimony, but One he really has a relationship with. He cried when he first listened to it. It was so great. One of his friends from church is really into One too. They listen to it all of the time and sing it. The other kid is a little more aggressive and he's really into "Author of Confusion" and "Reunion". It's a little more aggressive music. Will is just like "Dad, can we sing 'Cradle to the Grave' again?". He's learning it on the piano and everything so it's really cool.
Kim - How old is he?
Neal - He's eight.
Kim - How many kids do you have?
Neal - Three … two boys, one girl. It's great. I woke up and was thinking about how for years, before I found the Lord, I would wake up like "Oh man, another day to get through". Now I wake up and I'm praising the Lord in my half-sleep. I woke up this morning with my eyes right next to my daughter's face. What a change! For years I knew that I was missing a lot, I just didn't know how to get what I was missing. Sin is such a deceiver that I didn't really connect up why my life was so bad. Part of the reason that life is so good now, is because I'm faithful to my wife and so there's harmony in the home. The bigger reason is God's spirit working in our hearts. That's what makes it so I can wake up in a state of peace. It seems that when you're on the other side of it, you think "boy I was too stupid to figure that out". It's pretty basic really. If you're out of integrity in your life, it's not going to work out.
Kim - I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. I know you're gearing up to go on the road.
Neal - Yeah. You know, I haven't practiced a note of music. I've been just kind of going over a lot of Scriptures. The thing I'm doing in Europe isn't going to be just a concert. I'm going to be speaking from the word of God.
Kim - That will be cool.
Neal - I hope so. I've never done it before! This is my first time.
Kim - everyone has called your music progressive rock. So many people have different definitions of what that means. What does it mean to you?
Neal - It's hard to label. I wrote a song a long time ago called "Don't Label Me". My feeling about it is that it started off meaning rock music that is way out of the box. Now it's more a reference for certain elements in the music. I feel like those elements are having a lot of different styles in one piece of music. I was raised with a lot of classical music, because my dad's a music teacher. I sang a lot of really intricate and bizarre music when I was very young. I was used to that kind of thing in my ear. Then I got attracted to rock by groups like Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad. I went to a Black Sabbath concert and there was a group called Yes that I'd never heard of. It changed my life. I was 12 years old and I was like "whoa … you can have it all in one thing?". They had pop elements and pretty vocals with the power of rock, the intricacy of classical and the experimental element of jazz all in one piece. I still get excited about that. One of the things I love about music is contrast. When you can contrast a pretty part and an aggressive part, to me, it makes the pretty part prettier and the aggressive part more aggressive. It accentuates the styles themselves. I enjoy that as a listener. But not all the time. Every album doesn't have to be that way all of the time. There is room for all of us. In the mornings I like something more mellow and good singer/songwriters. You can hear it in my music. I've always liked Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor. Who doesn't love a good song? Prog fans do too. I think, in Spock's Beard, sometimes we were afraid to do good songs because fans wouldn't accept them and they would think we'd sold out. But we did a song called "June" which was a regular song, and it wound up being one of our most popular.
