No sooner did Powered by Light come out than we had to cancel an important show at Orion Studios when our bassist Tony D'Amato decided he could not continue. We decided, after trying out a couple of bassists who did not work out, that we would try to continue with me playing left hand bass, and we learned some cover songs from Jethro Tull, the Allman Brothers, Cream, Rush, Asia and even Mountain to go out and play in the bars and also perform some of our originals, and had very poor results, although when we debuted one of the Travelog songs for the first time in March of 2011 at an all-original show it went over great. During that time we did get to Orion as a trio (no bass) and did what is still probably our best overall show, and early in 2011 we met a singer, and later on a bassist, who joined and made us a five-piece, but the singer insisted on being a much more covers-oriented group.

We continued to play the bars and got nowhere, and began trying to record originals with them, hammering at it for two years when we realized the singer, for all his talent, wasn't right for us, and we let him go, and the bassist subsequently quit while we were negotiating with a Canadian promoter to tour with a couple of big Canadian prog artists who I will not name because it turned out he was a fraud. Having lost those guys we were back to a trio at the end of 2013 and Todd and I decided, “to hell with it, let's concentrate on making another album.” Michael Murray, our drummer, broke out his laptop and a Sonar X-1 recording program, and we got to work, with Todd and I turning out four more pieces that together with the one mentioned earlier, became Travelog. 

We labored a couple of nights and one weekend day for over a year, but could not locate a vocalist in Richmond. We had decided I would no longer be the voice of the band, and after failing to find someone in Richmond, we went the guest artist route with Dimetrius LaFavors of Odin's Court, Michelle Schrotz of Brave, and Cprog artist Mike Florio handling the singing.

While this was going on, when I let it be known we wanted to hire out the mixing and mastering we were approached by Steve Babb and Fred Schendel of Glass Hammer who told us they wanted to do the mixing job because they knew of us and all our difficulties getting this done over a long period of time. You can imagine how amazed I was to find out that these two legendary prog people wanted to get involved with little old us. Of course we said “Yes,” they proved their mettle in some trial mixes, and away we went, finally getting product in hand just in time for two important shows at Orion and New Jersey Proghouse on May 29 and June 6 respectively. 

 All I can tell you is that I want to play at ROSfest with KE next spring so badly I now care only about that. Who knows whether we will get an invite, though? I will continue promoting Travelog and sharing the reviews that keep coming in with 3.5, 4 and 5 stars consistently, try to arrange some shows somewhere where Michelle and Mike Florio can justify traveling to play them with us, and pray that I can keep this very talented group together. I would like to keep creating new music with this band, but right now everyone seems to need some time away from the band, so that is on hold for now.

It's much more symphonic, the pieces are longer and more interconnected, the lyrics deal with how precious individual liberty is rather than the Christian themes I had been pursuing. The production is light years better than Powered by Light thanks to the Glass Hammer guys, and of course, the singing is immeasurably better. The imagery is a little darker and the mood is more somber because we are almost in a lament over world events, and as such there's more of a feel of searching for something like on a Big Big Train album.  A lot of people are amazed at how good it came out because they more or less forgot about us for a few years while we were, um, trying to figure out what to do.