Neal comments:
“As I was gathering a bunch of random ideas in February for this album, when I got home and started to put it together, the riff that starts this song was the very first thing I recorded. I couldn’t play the riff and sing at the same time so I wrote it separately. The chorus came from some ideas I had while early morning walking in Sydney, Australia.
“Sola Gratia is the only album Mike, Randy and I made remotely and I think they absolutely killed it!
“Lyrically, I am fascinated by the conversion of Saul of Tarsus to Paul the Apostle. The fact the he starts off persecuting christians and then becomes the guy who writes most of the New Testament is a rich story..there’s so much to it…it may become a series!”
The title ‘Sola Gratia’ of course has echoes of Morse’s 2007 epic ‘Sola Scriptura’, about the life of Martin Luther, but was in fact originally the result of a simple marital misunderstanding: “I was talking to my wife Cherie about debuting this new piece at Morsefest 2020 (Morse’s annual fan convention in Nashville) and she said she thought it would be good for me to do a solo album. However, I thought she said ‘Sola album’ and – because some of the new ideas involved Paul’s aggressive pursuit of the early Christians, I could see a link to some of the themes of persecution in ‘Sola Scriptura’.”
The music was recorded ‘virtually’ in April 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus lockdown with long term collaborators Mike Portnoy (drums) and Randy George (bass): “It’s the first album we have ever made remotely: I sent them the basic tracks and asked if they wanted to rearrange things, but they just said ‘No, it’s great!’, so they just played to it and sent their parts back over. It wasn’t an easy way to make an album, but creating always has its challenges, no matter how you do it.”
As Morse explains, it was this process that decided that ‘Sola Gratia’ was to be a Neal Morse album, rather than being credited to The Neal Morse Band: “With the Neal Morse Band, the whole band works together on the writing, and while Eric Gillette plays some guitar and Bill Hubauer has added some keyboards on this one, neither of them wrote – or is singing – on this album.”