Neal Morse is gone. End of story. Move on. That’s exactly what the members of Spock’s Beard have done and they’ve delivered a fresh-sounding and eclectic release, Feel Euphoria, on Inside Out Music America, that will certainly have fans and critics talking for some time to come. The Beard may have been trimmed, sure, but now that you can see more of the face, you can tell there’s a handsome creature under there. That’s really the essence of Feel Euphoria, a disc that shows that Spock’s Beard are just getting started after nearly a decade together.

I caught up with Nick D’Virgilio as he wound his way around Pennsylvania on a tour bus with his summertime bandmates, Fates Warning. Visit http://www.spocksbeard.com.

JB: It was just under a year ago that Neal Morse left Spock's Beard. What was the first feeling. Were you were angry and disappointed at first?
NDV: I can really only speak for myself but it went from everything from surprise to anger to being dumbfounded, thinking, “What the hell are you talking about?” It was a like your girlfriend dumping you.

JB: How do you get through that? I'm guessing that at some point there may have been the question of “Well, Neal's gone. What are we going to do?”
NDV: We decided to keep the band going pretty much right away. That seemed to be a given. We wanted to do something and not stop. Not everybody was exactly sure what to do at the very beginning, though I saw an opportunity and wanted to grab it as soon as possible.

JB: Well, it would have been unfortunate to let it go.
NDV: I put a lot into this band. I've been with it since the very beginning. I put in time and effort and didn't always make money. There were times where I got behind on my bills and all those things for this band and I didn't want it to just end like that. A lot of my motivation was there. I couldn't see saying, “Okay, we're done now because Neal left.”

JB: Remind me a little bit about how Spock's came together in the first place.
NDV: I met Neal and Alan in the valley in Los Angeles in Studio City at the Universal Bar and Grill. I just happened to sit in at the same time as them for a blues jam. Neal was really drunk and we started chatting about prog and then he called me for something, maybe another jam. When I went down, he had basically the whole Light record that he'd demoed out. He told me that he and Alan were trying to put together a band and do some prog stuff. I took the demo and we started the band. We had a different bass player at the very, very beginning and we didn't have Ryo at the very, very beginning.

JB: You'd been doing sessions at that time?
NDV: I was just a local musician trying to find a gig. I was doing cover gigs or whatever I could do. Neal's demo was pretty good. It was the early '90s, it was full-on Nirvana time. We'd just come out of the '80s and music was sucking in my opinion. So, having someone give me this tape of all this progressive rock was like, “Wow! Cool!”

JB: What were the early reactions as you started gigging?
NDV: We always had good reactions but we were throwbacks to the '70s while there was all this grungey, punky stuff happening. We were doing the opposite. It took a couple of years to get the ball rolling. Al wound up putting up the money to do the first record. But after we got Dave and Ryo in the band we did ProgFest in 1994 and that was the first time that we actually realized that there was actually a market out there for prog. The Internet was just starting and I had no idea about all the mail-order prog catalogues stuff. I had no idea about that or that there were small labels putting that stuff out.

JB: What's amazing to me is the level of loyalty that progressive fans have. Do you have a sense of that?
NDV: Some are almost too loyal. They're very passionate about us or any of the bands that are out there. But there has to be a point where it's all music at the end of the day. We're all playing music. You've got to take that, whether the stuff is your cup of tea of not. Thank God they're that loyal. We've had a career because of people digging the music that we make.

JB: There are also these strange intersections that occur: Mike Portnoy will go off and do Liquid Tension Experiment or O.S.I or you'll go off and work with Mike Keneally and Fates Warning. Do you see those outside gigs as opportunities to spread the word about Spock's in a way?
NDV: It's cool. Because, with this tour, there's been a smattering of Spock's fans at each gig. I think the Spock's t-shirts are out there. I'm out here doing this because the band's cool, it's fun, the music's challenging, I'm making a little money and it's always good to get out there and promote, however you can. If I wasn't doing this I'd just be at home doing interviews, so it's good to get out and keep the ball rolling.

JB: And now Feel Euphoria is coming out. Everybody was able to contribute to the writing this time out. How much material was brought to the table for this record?
NDV: There wasn't a ton brought to the table that we didn't use because we didn't have much time. We had to make a decision to go for it. I wrote “Sid,” that long epic thing. That's kind of how I got the whole ball rolling. Al already had a couple of pieces written by that point, then we wrote a couple more. “Feel Euphoria” was written in the studio while we were rehearsing. Ryo brought in a kind of rough sketch of the tune and then we sort of turned it into what it is. “Ghosts Of Autumn,” which Dave co-wrote with John Boegehold was written by the two of them via e-mail, sending MP3s.

JB: I really like “Ghosts of Autumn.” What was your first reaction when Dave presented that?
NDV: I wasn't a fan of it, to be honest with you. Not at the very beginning. It came to life after we got into the studio once we started layering the instruments and then the sound of it and everything made it turn into a song that I really became a big fan of. I wasn't into it at the very beginning but it's like that with a lot of tunes. To me, that's so prog. It turned out really good.

JB: Does it make it harder to work on a song when you don't initially like it or does something else take over and make you say, “Well, it's a song. It's on the table. We gotta give it the time”?
NDV: Well, to be honest, we wanted everybody to have a song on the record. That was a good thing for morale. Dave really wanted to contribute with more than just playing bass and we really all wanted him to as well. Even though I wasn't into the tune at first I gave it my best and then, like I say, it grew. Sometimes the best things come out of that. You don't have to be in love with something right at the beginning. It can grow on you and that's a really good thing.

JB: Can you tell me a little bit about the genesis of “The Bottom Line”?
NDV: Well, the genesis of it is that my friend Stan [Ausmus], who is an old friend, he was the guitar player in the first band I was in when I was fifteen. Anyway, I went over to his house and he had the opening guitar riff to that song and I think the chord progression where the vocal comes in. It was all on his computer at home. He was just working on it and we ended up working on the tune, just jamming on it. We came up with the little breakdown section after where the vocal comes in and a couple of other ideas. I just took it home and wrote the song from that point. The sort of Tears For Fears section is mine.

JB: Do you prefer collaborating because you can sometimes pick and choose whereas with yourself, you might not see around certain corners as well?
NDV: I like both. Sometimes I'd go to Stan's and we'd hang out all night and not one idea would come out that would be worthwhile. [Laughs.] Sometimes we'd go all night long. Sometimes Al would come over, sometimes Rick Musallam [Mike Keneally Band guitarist] would come over and there'd be jams between the four of us. But you never really know what's going to come out of it.

JB: I've seen a tremendous amount of growth in your lyric writing since the Karma record. What is lyric writing like for you?
NDV: Lyrics have always been hard for me. I didn't grow up being a songwriter. I grew up being a player. I didn't study the craft of songwriting or what it takes to write lyrics, so when I started writing I always thought that my lyrics were cheesy. So I've just been trying to read a lot of books and steal ideas from other people, whether Neal or Peter Gabriel. I've been looking at how they say things that sometimes other people have said but when they do it it doesn't sound cheesy. It's really tough. I think it's one of the toughest things in the world, to write lyrics. Melodies are not nearly as hard, riffs aren't, but coming up with lyrics that I feel good about is really tough.

JB: Well, you've certainly been around some great songwriters whether Neal or Kevin Gilbert.
NDV: Oh, God. He was amazing. Neal's really good, don't get me wrong but Kevin was able to write lyrics. But even him, even with his first band Giraffe, he wrote songs that had cheesy lyrics but he really grew into being a serious lyricist and that was just after time and effort, you know? So, I think it's something that the more you do it, the better you get at it.