Going solely on the basis of his world-class guitarmanship, one can picture Steve Morse spending his days with a metronome by his side, peeling off endless scalar exercises to perfect the “chops" that have made him one of the most honored guitar virtuousos of the last fifteen years. Possibly this is how things once were, but these days Morse has a big farm in Georgia to attend to when he’s not on the road with the Steve Morse Band or Kansas, as well as a slew of non-musical hobbies that he’s particularly fond of. “Today was a typically good day at home," says Morse, after a beautiful spring day at his Peach State homestead. “I got to work outside and ride my motorcross bike. I also flew my airplane and spent some time with my wife, too. I picked up my guitar this morning, but night is the time I dedicate to music. I can’t bear to play the guitar when it’s a beautiful day outside, because I know my heart’s not in it. But if I’m recording in my 24-track studio here, I generally stay up till six or seven in the morning, just working the nightshift without interruption. I get things like “Ghostwind" by recording at four in the morning, totally alone. It puts me in a very hypnotic state of mind."

Besides the ethereal track called “Ghostwind," Morse has cut nine other new songs during the midnight hour to make up his first self-titled recording in almost four years, High Tension Wires. This intriguing effort shows the guitarist making a departure from his usual high volume sonics and exploring fresh musical areas that fuse electric, acoustic, guitar synthesizer and classical guitar textures. Though the music on High Tension Wires emphasizes acoustic simplicity over hard rocking electricity, it’s nonetheless a stunning example Morse’s immense musicality and his acclaimed technical prowess on the guitar, proving beyond doubt that he can race around the fretboard of an acoustic steel-string with the same athletic agility that he’s displayed o his custom telecaster for years. More, this recording marks the return of a somewhat rejuvenated Steve Morse, who after a few years out of the guitar hero spotlight, has found himself back on the road of musical experimentation, growth and profound self-discovery.

"High Tension Wires is my first real solo album," says Morse. "The ideas are generated from my guitar rather than from a band situation. I initially began the album with the idea of it being half acoustic and half electric, but it just evolved to the point where I was incorporating acoustic elements into tunes with drums, and things like that. So it's sort of a new sound for me. It felt very natural to do the recording by myself, but actually I had no choice at the time. The Steve Morse Band broke up about three years ago, after a tour we did with Rush. It was just a natural stopping point for the band and the other guys wanted to try their hands at more secure kinds of work. Jerry Peek, our bassist, is a design engineer for a corporation, and Rod Morgenstein's been in several bands and has now hit a homerun playing drums in Winger. And I became an airline pilot and I didn't have time to run a band. The decision to return to music full time was a little forced, because, as a pilot, I couldn't schedule anything else. I then started working on solo tracks that I thought would later be complemented with band material by some future band of mine. I remember not worrying about what instrumentation I put in, just whatever fit the track. For example, on some tracks I play solos on classical guitar, mostly because I just happen to have an Ovation Classical that goes in stereo, with one string to the left and one to the right. I thought that was a neat effect and such an unlikely instrument to put in. Soloing on acoustic is a lot different than electric soloing. You have to get intensity by way of note choices and the musicality of the lines you're playing. You can't just use a lot of sustain, feedback and harmonics like you do on electric. But I enjoy it just as much as electric soloing and that's one reason that the album is good quality and it's very thought out."

Lest any Steve Morse aficionado fear that the master has lost the metalish electric attitude that has powered his recordings since his 1977 debut with the Dixie Dregs and "gone New Age," there is one track on High Tension Wires that's especially for them. Entitled "Tumeni Notes," this electric rave-up is Morse's best show-off-my-chops tune since 1979's "The Bash," and it's also one of the best rockers he's ever written, particularly because of its central guitar lick: a fast, quasi-baroque figure that's laid square on top of an exquisitely crude drumbeat. "'Tumeni Notes' is really a guitar exercise," explains Morse. "I enjoy writing little pieces that are hard to play and help keep my chops out. It's like the Spanish approach to doing classical guitar studies. They'll pick one technique and write music around it. For this song, it was fast triplets and arpeggiated chords in triplets, picking every note with an up and down movement, which is a difficult thing to do. It's boring to practice, but playing it with music forces you to try and get it right. The fast muted arpeggios are just straight alternate picking, done on a stereo version of my Music Man guitar. Originally, each string went to either the left or right channels, but it sounded so weird that I blended it more towards the middle because I didn't want to put anybody in a mental hospital. One thing that really throws people off about High Tension Wires is the sequencing of the album, something that was done quite intentionally. The order of the tracks was done to appeal to a more eclectic audience, who had never heard my music before, and so the things that are more typically me, like 'Tumeni Notes,' are put further back on the album. That's why the album comes off as a little more restrained. There's always been a confusion as to what to file my albums under anyway, and I don't know where High Tension Wires will end up–whether it's Rock, Jazz, or New Age. I've always wanted to do more atmospheric things, like Pat Metheny does, because he's a master of melodic guitar, but then again, I'm driven to do things like 'Tumeni Notes."'

Another interesting sidelight to High Tension Wires is a version of the Dixie Dregs standard of "Leprechaun Promenade," which also appeared on last year's Dregs reunion CD3 for Ensoniq synthesizers. Choosing to redo this song may seem like an odd decision, since it's not one of the Dregs most memorable pieces (though the other cover on the Ensoniq project, "Take It off the Top" definitely is), but it's a composition that Morse felt hadn't been done to perfection yet and that was reason enough for this meticulous musician to do it again: "Originally, 'Leprechaun Promenade' was on an early Dixie Dregs demo called The Great Spectacular, of which only about 1,500 copies were made. Then a shorter live version was on Night of the Living Dregs, that had none of the impact that I envisioned it having. But then we did that Dregs reunion for Ensoniq last year and we added about three minutes of new music and gave it a new feel. For legal reasons, we couldn't start a new song with a new title, so the alternative was to drastically modify an older one. The whole band got together in my little studio–me, Andy West, Rod Morgenstein, Allen Sloan and T Lavitz–and we really hadn't played together for years. But we put ‘Leprechaun Promenade' together in a single day and it was such a neat time and sounded so good that I wanted to put it on High Tension Wires.

"As for the related Celtic influences on the album' I guess they've always been in my music. You can hear the Celtic bits in earlier Dregs songs like 'Patchwork.' I love Irish music and bands like the Chieftains–that's beautiful stuff. The penny whistle sound on "Highland Wedding" is me bending artificial harmonics, which is a technique that I use a lot. It gives the melody a different sound. I get bored real quickly with one tone, so this is just a way of getting a different sound. I did bury a flute patch on the guitar synth for a few effects. It gives variety to my playing– another sound in my bag of tricks. Using the synthesizer live is the most natural thing in the world, too. When I go out on the road with the Steve Morse Band, it will be the first time that I'm using such a good synthesizer, the Shadow System from West Germany. All the new ones are tracking real good but I chose the Shadow with an Ensoniq rack and maybe a hard disk to store sounds on. I use MIDI a lot too but I'm not wild about it. It's amazing to see what technology can do and if you work by yourself you need something to play along with. But I don't use it all the time. 'Country Colors,' for example, is pretty stark– just guitar, bass and drums with tiny little atmospheric overdubs–and 'Modoc' is just classical guitar recorded straight into a digital master so it's not all MIDI."

While Morse may be an expert on the high-tech side of modern guitar equipment, he largely relies on conventional gear to create his endless variety of guitar tones. "My main electric these days is an Ernie Ball Music Man which is pretty much a copy of my original Telecaster. It does have some material changes' though. The neck is held on by six screws instead of four and it has four-and-two peg winders instead of six in a row, which makes for a shorter string pull and a shorter headstock. There's a metal bridge instead of the Tele's nylon piece bridge–there's much better sustain and harmonics. And the wood is a little heavier and stronger. Hardware-wise, it's just magnificent. At first, it felt a little cold, but after I got used to the metal bridge, I began preferring it for road work. It also has the DiMarzio pickups that are on all my guitars. In the studio, I use the Ovation Classical and live, I use the Gibson Chet Atkins model constantly because it doesn't feed back. For steel-string I'm using an older Fender twelve-string acoustic and an electric/acoustic Ovation medium-bowl that I just miked for this album. For amps, I have a Marshall Jubilee with JBL speakers and also an Ampeg V-4. Nothing does it like the Ampeg–it has a big ol' fat sound for soloing. In "The Road Home," the guitar solo starts right away and that fat sound is the Ampeg, which has a three-position midrange control to get that big sound. I just sit in the control room with the heads and play my guitar, alternating between Celestion and JBL speakers in the studio. Most of the time, I use my Lexicon 41 and PrimeTime and Lexicon reverbs. I also have the new diatonic harmonizer from Eventide. You can hear it making a slow backwards guitar sound on 'Leprechaun Promenade' and 'Southern Steel,' a track that I recorded just for GUITAR's new compilation album. It came at a really good time, because I felt I had been out of circulation long enough and I wanted to do something different like this. I wrote 'Southern Steel' just for the project and I wanted to do something that reflected more of my usual personality, guitar-wise. I used a little riff and a very energetic bass and guitar line to push it along, and then I tried to find a nice simple melody on top. I couldn't get Rod to play drums, because he was on tour, so I got Sonny Emery, the drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire, to play at the last minute. He was getting in on the fourth run through, so we started recording right away. I recorded myself with computers to keep time and then I recorded the guitars on top of that. Then I replaced the synth bass and drum machines with Jerry Peek and Sonny. It was a very quick session and fun, too."

Now that Morse is back having fun in the rock 'n' roll limelight, playing in his preferred trio format, many fans are getting curious about his three-year association with Kansas, a partnership that produced two lukewarm albums (Power, In the Spirit of Things) and also saw him lose some of his top guitar hero status to hot newcomers like Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson. Did Morse sell-out his acclaimed instrumental talents by joining this aged art-rock dinosaur, or was Kansas just another pitstop on his incredibly eclectic musical highway? Let the man speak for himself: "I'm not sure what's going to be happening next with Kansas, but I do know that I have to concentrate on my own gigs that are coming up. The new Kansas album's gotten some tough reviews and obviously, if it were my album, I'd have done things differently. But it was a group thing and I'm very happy about getting the experience to work with other people who I believe are talented. They know what they want and that's what makes a band, though I personally had a hard time putting my finger on what it was that they wanted. I was just trying to contribute in every way possible.

"There's definitely a psychological trade-off in playing with a band that's not your own. As a bandmember, you get to see what thought processes other people use to make a decision and that's always enlightening. There's so much less pressure being a member than a leader, but at the same time, when you come to something that you'd like to do differently, you can't do it differently. That's because you're in a band and you have to do your job. But there's a real stumbling point in the studio. The final word goes to the producer, who on the Kansas album was Bob Ezrin, producer of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Working with him was one of the reasons I quit my flying job, because I thought there'd be so much to learn. Bob taught me a real appreciation for thoroughness in the studio, in terms of pre-production. He also has an amazing musicality, knowing immediately which tracks are keepers and which aren't– he has great ears. In my own instrumental bands, it's always been more of a dictatorship than a democracy, though we'd never do a tune that anybody in the band hated. I sort of became leader by default, because I was always coming up with the songs. I think it's good to have one person in a band who has a vision to guide the music. When new players came in the band, I always made it clear ahead of time what my position was. But everybody makes valuable contributions. With Kansas, I was trying to be flexible and compliant and, as a result, they had me doing things like singing background vocals and doing pre-rehearsed stage movements. If there was something that was just too weird, I'd say something, but that wasn't often. I mean, Steve Walsh is the Kansas show, and it was interesting for me to see that other point of view.

"Playing with another guitarist in the band was interesting, too. Rich Williams is a very solid guitarist; he's sort of like a progressive rock version of Leslie West–very powerful, simple, and nice to listen to. Bob Ezrin wanted to give him more solo space on the new album, partially because he had been obscured so much in his years with the band. He's a neat guy to work with. On tour, some people did come to see me in Kansas because I'm Steve Morse, so I felt a responsibility to them to give them a little Steve Morse music. At the same time, it was a Kansas concert and my duty was to support them musically. But I guess the biggest thing that playing with Kansas has taught me is that I'm done with having vocals in my music. This gig showed me that playing my own music–instrumental music–was clearly reason enough for me to keep making music and albums. I told the guys in Kansas during these last few gigs that I had to work on my own project now and things would have to revolve around me in the future. They're in an experimental mode now, writing with other people and so on, so I don't think it was too weird. I feel like I've put in a good apprenticeship, as far as learning some new and different points of view, but now it's time to utilize what I've learned with them in my own projects."

Among the things that Morse was able to learn in his time away from the frontlines of guitar, is that rock 'n' roll guitar music is an ever-changing medium, and to remain competitive, even the best players have to change with the times. So, in the dynamic tradition of three of his favorite guitarists–Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny–Steve Morse is attempting to do just that. "Rock guitar has never been as high-tech or technically-oriented as it is today," says Morse. "I just got a locking Kahler tremolo and I'm experimenting with new pickups, too, if that says anything. It's exciting, but it seems that guitar players today are either being very melodic and tasteful or very technical. I try to walk the line between taste and technique and I think everyone would agree that it's best to have both. I think the speed fad has come and gone now. There's so many guitarists who can play fast that I think people want quality: the tie breaker now is who can play good. Yngwie was an innovator in a sense, because of his brash power of technique and his own harmonic ideas, but unfortunately, with his success there have been a lot of imitators. There's more instrumental guitar music today than there was ten years ago, and it's become very rock oriented, mostly because of Joe Satriani. I'm very much a fan of his, but at the same time, I purposely steered away from doing an all-rock guitar album on High Tension Wires. I wanted to have some drastic differences on it, because I felt that everyone in the world was going to be a copying him. Maybe he might have picked up some of my stuff, but everyone contributes something to the pool of music. I really don't know where his influences come from, but there's no doubt that he's a very mature and talented player.

"As for myself, I really want to be able to do everything on guitar and I feel disgusted when I can't play something. When I play next to Albert Lee, I wish I could do all his fingerpicking and beautiful melodies. Then I change the channel and see Vai and Satriani wailing away and I think that's amazing. Then there's the incredible clean soloing of a guys like Eric Johnson or Vinnie Moore, who has a very powerful Jeff Beck solo style. Or Pat Metheny, who can play a two-hour set of beautiful solo melodies without being chained to anything, or John McLaughlin, who's a total powerhouse on acoustic guitar. And just about any classical guitarist who has total control over a nylon string guitar. Or just the plain ol' boogie thing of, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ed King, who does this smoking Nashville kind of intro to that song "I Know a Little." I want to do everything. And I'd like to play with all the hotshot guitarists, if I could. When it was heavily suggested that I put some vocals on my last album, Stand Up, I tried to find as many guitarists who could sing as possible, because I like playing with them. So on that recording, I got Peter Frampton, Eric Johnson and Albert Lee to contribute. I get very influenced by other musicians, particularly by their state of mind, not just their playing. I've been influenced by things John McLaughlin has said to me, when we've toured, things that have shaped my destiny as a musician and person, too."

Now Morse's immediate destiny involves some serious roadwork with his band, which features some new faces from the Steve Morse Band of three years ago. But while the musicians may have changed, Morse assures us that the caliber of musicianship within the group is still in accord with his own high standards: "I'm going out on the road with bassist Dave LaRue, who did the Dregs reunion tour last summer, and drummer Van Romaine. Neither Andy West nor Jerry Peek could leave their jobs for the reunion, so Dave came in as the standby and did an amazing job. After the tour, Dave and Van learned some Dregs tunes and we got together and played. They were so good that I said, well, let's play tonight. They were just so serious about playing with me and learning the tunes. It's inspiring to work with guys who are that good and who want to work, so I'm really looking forward to this tour. I'm trying to plug myself back into the scene by playing with my band and also by doing some one-off gigs, like I've done in the past with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Albert Lee, and the German acoustic tour I did a few years ago with David Lindley and Richard Thompson. On that tour, we each did our little solo set, then all played together at the end, and it was amazing how well those guys held up their end of the bargain. We did a Gaelic song that Richard showed us and some of Dave's songs and also some covers of country songs that we all sang harmony and played guitar on. It was a very special gig and totally different for me. Heck, I even played on a Liza Minnelli album back in the late-1970s. For a while now, I've had to defer these unusual types of gigs, because of the Kansas obligation, but now I hope I can start doing them again.

"In the future, I'm not sure what's going to come out of the song part of the brain next. I'd like to do an all-classical guitar album with new songs and pieces licensed from the Dregs albums. If I could pull that off and convince the record company that it wouldn't be very expensive to do, it would be great. Now the most satisfying part of being a guitarist comes from playing live and creating new things every night through improvisation. I love when the music comes together and it moves me. And I love making friends with musicians who have something to say and will let you into their mind to know what they're thinking. The biggest privilege of playing music is having colleagues who you respect and get inspired by. Playing with new musicians is a continuing education for me and it's something I always hope to do. Doing that and playing my own music is probably what really excites me most about being a musician. I guess I'm addicted to new challenges on the guitar and that's why I've done so many different and unusual things. Being commercially successful has never been a goal of mine–as of yet. So if anybody would ever ask me if there's room in my guitar playing for future growth and improvement, my answer would unquestionably be yes!"

Transcribed by John D. Smith