Q: Can you talk about your musical history and how this unique project formed?
A: The core group of musicians behind Forgotten Roads have been working together since their high school days — a friendship and creative partnership that has now spanned decades. We started a progressive metal band called Bald Red Lady and recorded our first material in a local studio. The results were encouraging but rough, and that experience planted a seed: we wanted to learn how to make truly great recordings ourselves, at a professional level, without depending on outside facilities or budgets.
That led Nick and Gene to build a home studio, which became Rosemont Recordings — the creative home for everything we've done since. Over the years we've worked under several project names — Three Islands, Treatments, Body to the Bone, Bald Red Lady in various configurations — always with the same core ambition: to test the limits of our own talent, push our craft forward, and make music that genuinely means something to us. We've released over 40 albums' worth of material, most of it for ourselves and a core group of dedicated listeners. Our most widely heard work before this album has been under the banner of The Legend of the 16 Deadly Improvs — a series where we learned to record progressive improvised rock and capture the genesis of musical ideas as they form in real time. Most of that catalog is on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
Dave Wilson — our drummer, co-producer, and one of the founding creative forces of the Rosemont family — describes how Scenes from a Revolution actually began to take shape:
"My involvement in the project began one day when I was at Rosemont laying down a drum track. After recording, Nick happened to play me a few songs he'd been working on. I immediately liked what I heard and came up with something to record over the top of a keyboard piece. That piece turned out to be 'Revolution (Reprise).' I told Nick he had some really cool stuff here that he shouldn't let go to waste. From there, we started to build each song, and I would come over to the studio over weeks and months to complete the drum tracks."
Once the basic tracks were taking shape, the question of voices became central. Dave takes up the story:
"We thought about female vocalists. Several that I reached out to — some of them truly talented singers — didn't know how to approach the songs. Then I reached out to Barbara, who is part of Kingston and Greystarr, and asked if she would be interested. She said yes. We sent her a song called 'Inner Voice' — basically just the track, the lyrics, and the instruction to come up with a melody. What they sent back was truly mind-blowing. The project really took off from there as we continued to send them more songs, and each time the results were great."
But Scenes from a Revolution is something different from anything Rosemont had done before — and it has a specific origin story that goes beyond the music. In the years following the release of Steven Wilson's Hand. Cannot. Erase., we found ourselves genuinely stunned by what that record achieved — the quality of the performances, the integrity of the concept, the way the personal and the universal were completely fused in the music. We asked each other: could we make something that good? Could we build something that stood alongside the greatest progressive rock albums ever made — not as an imitation, but on its own terms?
That challenge collided with something Gene had been carrying for years: the desire to create a project rooted in the extraordinary history of his family — White Russians who fled the Bolsheviks, a grandmother taken as slave labor by the Germans, a step-grandfather who signed a declaration to save his life and never saw his children again. When we realized that this history could serve as the foundation for a full-scale modern rock opera — something conceived not only as an album but as a work that could live on a stage — everything clicked into focus.
Nick accepted the challenge and spent years writing the music, assembling an international cast of musicians — some we'd worked with since the beginning, others we had to find and earn the trust of — and building the record piece by piece. This is the result.
Q: What are some of the themes and concepts with Forgotten Roads?
A: At its core, Scenes from a Revolution is about what happens to ordinary people when ideology consumes a civilization. Not generals or commissars or historical figures — but a grandmother hiding her icons, a cavalry officer destroying his own documents and learning a new name, a prisoner signing a piece of paper to stay alive. The grand sweep of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the German occupation of World War II is the backdrop — but the foreground is always the human being standing in front of the door when the knock comes.
Thematically, the album circles around a question that Gene originally asked himself, and which he found he couldn't answer: Would I have had that courage? Would I have left everything behind — with a few pots and pans and whatever fit on a sled — and kept moving? The album doesn't answer that. It holds the question open across nearly 70 minutes and dares the listener to sit with it.
Specific themes include the slow erosion of faith and conscience under totalitarian pressure — which is what "Inner Voice" is about — and the systematic destruction of the Russian Orthodox clergy, which "500" addresses directly. That song is based on a documented historical event: hundreds of priests were transported to Siberia by the Bolsheviks and given a final opportunity to renounce their faith. Every single one refused. The photographer sent to document the mass conversions converted to Christianity instead. A church now stands on the mass grave at Butovo, outside Moscow. That story demanded to be in this album.
"Dedushka" is perhaps the most emotionally complex track — it tells the story of Gene and Nick's step-grandfather Stephan, a prisoner of war who cooperated with the Germans to survive, signed a declaration that made him a Soviet-designated traitor, and left behind a wife and three daughters he would never see again. In the 1970s he found them and called. They told him never to call again — acknowledging him could get them arrested. The album incorporates the actual declaration he signed, read aloud by a native Russian voice-over artist over music. No invented drama could touch that.
And then there's "The Long Defeat?" — the album's most directly philosophical track, and the one with the most pointed contemporary relevance. The question mark in the title is not decorative. It asks whether freedom is losing its battle against totalitarianism — not in the 1920s, but right now. Whether the patterns we're documenting are safely historical, or whether they repeat. We leave that question entirely open. That's not a dodge — it's the point.
Q: What drives you to create the kind of music you do?
A: At its heart, this is a modern progressive rock opera — a work conceived from the beginning to function both as an album and as the foundation for a potential stage musical. That framing is important, because it explains why the music refuses to stay in any single lane.
Think about the great rock operas and musicals that have shaped how we experience storytelling through music — The Wall, Tommy, Hamilton, and modern musicals with massive cultural reach like The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen, and even American Idiot. What those works share is the ability to use music as pure emotional architecture: to put the audience inside a reality rather than observing it from a distance. That is precisely what we set out to do. The theatrical tradition gave us permission to move between moods, tempos, and textures that a conventional album might not attempt — from a mellotron overture to an electronica and nu-metal portrait of Rasputin to a classical guitar and string quartet journey across Central Europe — and have all of it feel unified by the story it serves.
The artists who shaped our musical thinking span a wide range deliberately. Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree showed us how the personal can become the universal in progressive music. Radiohead demonstrated that emotional weight and sonic experimentation don't require conventional structure — that a record can be both deeply affecting and completely unpredictable in how it gets there. Bands like Marillion, Riverside, and King Crimson built the template for long-form narrative music with genuine emotional intelligence. And the electronica and atmospheric production techniques that have defined the last two decades of forward-thinking rock gave us tools for texture and world-building that older prog didn't have access to.
The material demanded all of it. These were real people — Gene and Nick's grandparents. The music had to be worthy of what they actually lived through, which meant it could not be timid, nostalgic, or stylistically comfortable.
Beyond that, there's something that drives Nick specifically as a composer and producer: the obsessive desire to capture lightning in a bottle. The 16 Deadly Improvs work was about learning to catch great musical ideas in real time, unmediated. This album was the opposite discipline — the same obsessive ambition, applied to years of careful construction rather than real-time improvisation. Both approaches answer the same drive: to make something genuinely excellent as a piece of art — worthy of a listener's full, committed attention.
Q: What is the recording process like for the band?
A: It's genuinely international and genuinely collaborative in a way that wouldn't have been possible even fifteen years ago. Nick created the initial foundation — the "base music" — composing and demoing both guitar-based and keyboard-based pieces using GarageBand for iPad and Logic. Those demos were then brought into Logic at Rosemont Recordings Studio, where they were finalized, often retaining much of the original demo instrumentation because Nick had already captured something in those initial sessions worth keeping.
Dave Wilson was central to bringing those foundations to life:
"Some of the drumming was recorded in my home during Covid, and there were moments I thought we would never see the light of day. But I'm very proud of the drumming on this record — it is a true drum record. Military beats, electronic drums, all kinds of stuff. I felt that each different approach served the story we were telling."
From there, the process varied by track, but the general shape was consistent: drums — acoustic, electronic, or combinations of both — were recorded at Rosemont. Melodies were then developed separately by Kingston, Greystarr, and Mark Nowak, working from Gene's lyrics and from each other's ideas, and recorded in their own locations. The broader supporting cast — Kelly O'Donahue on horns, Neemias Texiera on piano, David Griffiths on string arrangement, Mark Wade on upright bass, Mariano on strings, Vin Villanueva on guitar — all recorded their contributions independently and sent them in. Jeff Bridi was the exception; his bass, guitars, and vocals were recorded at Rosemont directly.
The group's shared vision directed the overall arrangements throughout, with Nick handling the mixing. It's worth noting that several tracks had demos going back years, while others were added, refined, or completed within the final year based on feedback from the full cast. The album was mastered at Rosemont by Nick and Gene together.
What makes this unusual for a self-funded independent project is the sheer number of musicians involved across such a range of disciplines — and the fact that it was all coordinated without a label, a manager, or any conventional infrastructure, held together by shared commitment to the material and working relationships that in some cases stretch back to when we were all teenagers. The album was completed in parallel with other Rosemont projects — including new entries in the 16 Deadly Improvs series, A Collection of Dust, and The Ritual — which gives you some sense of how productive and relentless the Rosemont operation actually is.
Q: What made you want to release a concept album?
A: Two things collided at the right moment, and once they did, there was really no other form the project could take.
The first was the challenge we set ourselves. We wanted to make a modern progressive rock opera that could stand alongside the most ambitious works the genre has produced — and the concept album, with its theatrical scope and narrative arc, is the format most suited to that ambition. It demands everything: compositional range, lyrical depth, thematic unity, the ability to sustain a listener's attention across an entire journey rather than just a single track. If you're going to make your most serious artistic statement, a concept album is where you put it. And if you're building something that could ultimately live on a stage, you need a work with the structural integrity to survive the transition — scenes, characters, emotional arcs, a beginning and an end.
The second was the subject matter itself. The story of Gene and Nick's family — the Bohensky side fleeing the Bolsheviks across two decades and three countries, the Solodownikowa side taken prisoner and put to work in German factories, the Poljakow story of survival, betrayal, and the heartbreaking phone call in the 1970s — this material doesn't fit on a single track. It doesn't fit on an EP. It needs nearly 70 minutes because the history it inhabits spans decades and multiple catastrophes. The concept album format was the only container large enough to hold it.
What we were also very deliberate about was not making a straightforward narrative record. We didn't want to tell the story sequentially, like a documentary. We wanted to create a series of emotional scenes — vignettes of suffering, anxiety, faith, and endurance — that allow the listener to feel something of what these people lived through before they go looking for the historical context. The lyrics are intentionally oblique for that reason. The album rewards research, but it works as pure emotional music first. That balance — between the accessible and the layered, between the personal and the universal, between the album and the potential stage experience — is what we believe makes a concept work worth a listener's time.
Q: What other things should we know about the music? Anything you want our audience to know about?
A: A few things we'd want every listener to know before they press play.
First: this is entirely self-funded and self-directed. There's no label behind it, no promotional machine, no A&R filtering the creative decisions. Every choice on this album — the years of development, the international cast, the incorporation of a real historical document read aloud by a native Russian voice-over artist, the decision to put a question mark in the title of the most politically charged track — was made by us, without compromise, because we believed it was the right artistic call. For listeners who care about creative integrity, that matters.
Second: the vocalists — Kingston, Greystarr, Mark Nowak, and Jeff Bridi — gave extraordinary performances for material they may not have fully understood at the time of recording. Kingston and Greystarr, who carry the emotional weight of most of the album, recorded their parts without the full historical context of what the lyrics were referencing. That means they'll encounter the finished work, in all its weight and meaning, essentially as listeners for the first time — which we find remarkable, and which says something about the power of responding to lyrics on a purely human level even without the backstory.
Dave Wilson speaks to what the project ultimately meant to him as an artist:
"This is a true concept record — something I always wanted to do in my life. I feel it is one of the most fulfilling projects I've ever worked on. I've been part of many projects at Rosemont — Bald Red Lady, Body, To the Bone, The 16 Deadly Improvs, and others. But this one is different. I'm very proud of what we've built here."
Third, and perhaps most important: this album — and the stage musical we envision it becoming — is a direct challenge to the idea that independent music has to be modest in its ambitions. We gave ourselves a specific benchmark when we started: music that stands alongside the best that progressive rock, the theatrical tradition, and modern cinematic composition have ever produced. We worked across many years to meet it. We're not saying we succeeded. That's for listeners and audiences to judge. But we're saying we tried, seriously and without reservation, and that everything we had learned across a lifetime of making music together was poured into this record.
The forgotten roads of the title are real roads — walked by real people who are part of our family, and part of the larger family of everyone who has ever been displaced, hunted, imprisoned, or forced to choose between survival and identity. Those roads are being walked today, in other countries, by other families. If this music sends even a handful of listeners looking for the history behind it — for the church at Butovo, for the story of the White Russian exile communities, for what it meant to sign a declaration in a prisoner-of-war camp — then it has done something that music rarely gets to do. It has made the forgotten, remembered.
Visit us at www.scenesfromarevolution.com — and listen from the beginning, in one sitting, with the volume up.
A: The core group of musicians behind Forgotten Roads have been working together since their high school days — a friendship and creative partnership that has now spanned decades. We started a progressive metal band called Bald Red Lady and recorded our first material in a local studio. The results were encouraging but rough, and that experience planted a seed: we wanted to learn how to make truly great recordings ourselves, at a professional level, without depending on outside facilities or budgets.
That led Nick and Gene to build a home studio, which became Rosemont Recordings — the creative home for everything we've done since. Over the years we've worked under several project names — Three Islands, Treatments, Body to the Bone, Bald Red Lady in various configurations — always with the same core ambition: to test the limits of our own talent, push our craft forward, and make music that genuinely means something to us. We've released over 40 albums' worth of material, most of it for ourselves and a core group of dedicated listeners. Our most widely heard work before this album has been under the banner of The Legend of the 16 Deadly Improvs — a series where we learned to record progressive improvised rock and capture the genesis of musical ideas as they form in real time. Most of that catalog is on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
Dave Wilson — our drummer, co-producer, and one of the founding creative forces of the Rosemont family — describes how Scenes from a Revolution actually began to take shape:
"My involvement in the project began one day when I was at Rosemont laying down a drum track. After recording, Nick happened to play me a few songs he'd been working on. I immediately liked what I heard and came up with something to record over the top of a keyboard piece. That piece turned out to be 'Revolution (Reprise).' I told Nick he had some really cool stuff here that he shouldn't let go to waste. From there, we started to build each song, and I would come over to the studio over weeks and months to complete the drum tracks."
Once the basic tracks were taking shape, the question of voices became central. Dave takes up the story:
"We thought about female vocalists. Several that I reached out to — some of them truly talented singers — didn't know how to approach the songs. Then I reached out to Barbara, who is part of Kingston and Greystarr, and asked if she would be interested. She said yes. We sent her a song called 'Inner Voice' — basically just the track, the lyrics, and the instruction to come up with a melody. What they sent back was truly mind-blowing. The project really took off from there as we continued to send them more songs, and each time the results were great."
But Scenes from a Revolution is something different from anything Rosemont had done before — and it has a specific origin story that goes beyond the music. In the years following the release of Steven Wilson's Hand. Cannot. Erase., we found ourselves genuinely stunned by what that record achieved — the quality of the performances, the integrity of the concept, the way the personal and the universal were completely fused in the music. We asked each other: could we make something that good? Could we build something that stood alongside the greatest progressive rock albums ever made — not as an imitation, but on its own terms?
That challenge collided with something Gene had been carrying for years: the desire to create a project rooted in the extraordinary history of his family — White Russians who fled the Bolsheviks, a grandmother taken as slave labor by the Germans, a step-grandfather who signed a declaration to save his life and never saw his children again. When we realized that this history could serve as the foundation for a full-scale modern rock opera — something conceived not only as an album but as a work that could live on a stage — everything clicked into focus.
Nick accepted the challenge and spent years writing the music, assembling an international cast of musicians — some we'd worked with since the beginning, others we had to find and earn the trust of — and building the record piece by piece. This is the result.
Q: What are some of the themes and concepts with Forgotten Roads?
A: At its core, Scenes from a Revolution is about what happens to ordinary people when ideology consumes a civilization. Not generals or commissars or historical figures — but a grandmother hiding her icons, a cavalry officer destroying his own documents and learning a new name, a prisoner signing a piece of paper to stay alive. The grand sweep of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the German occupation of World War II is the backdrop — but the foreground is always the human being standing in front of the door when the knock comes.
Thematically, the album circles around a question that Gene originally asked himself, and which he found he couldn't answer: Would I have had that courage? Would I have left everything behind — with a few pots and pans and whatever fit on a sled — and kept moving? The album doesn't answer that. It holds the question open across nearly 70 minutes and dares the listener to sit with it.
Specific themes include the slow erosion of faith and conscience under totalitarian pressure — which is what "Inner Voice" is about — and the systematic destruction of the Russian Orthodox clergy, which "500" addresses directly. That song is based on a documented historical event: hundreds of priests were transported to Siberia by the Bolsheviks and given a final opportunity to renounce their faith. Every single one refused. The photographer sent to document the mass conversions converted to Christianity instead. A church now stands on the mass grave at Butovo, outside Moscow. That story demanded to be in this album.
"Dedushka" is perhaps the most emotionally complex track — it tells the story of Gene and Nick's step-grandfather Stephan, a prisoner of war who cooperated with the Germans to survive, signed a declaration that made him a Soviet-designated traitor, and left behind a wife and three daughters he would never see again. In the 1970s he found them and called. They told him never to call again — acknowledging him could get them arrested. The album incorporates the actual declaration he signed, read aloud by a native Russian voice-over artist over music. No invented drama could touch that.
And then there's "The Long Defeat?" — the album's most directly philosophical track, and the one with the most pointed contemporary relevance. The question mark in the title is not decorative. It asks whether freedom is losing its battle against totalitarianism — not in the 1920s, but right now. Whether the patterns we're documenting are safely historical, or whether they repeat. We leave that question entirely open. That's not a dodge — it's the point.
Q: What drives you to create the kind of music you do?
A: At its heart, this is a modern progressive rock opera — a work conceived from the beginning to function both as an album and as the foundation for a potential stage musical. That framing is important, because it explains why the music refuses to stay in any single lane.
Think about the great rock operas and musicals that have shaped how we experience storytelling through music — The Wall, Tommy, Hamilton, and modern musicals with massive cultural reach like The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen, and even American Idiot. What those works share is the ability to use music as pure emotional architecture: to put the audience inside a reality rather than observing it from a distance. That is precisely what we set out to do. The theatrical tradition gave us permission to move between moods, tempos, and textures that a conventional album might not attempt — from a mellotron overture to an electronica and nu-metal portrait of Rasputin to a classical guitar and string quartet journey across Central Europe — and have all of it feel unified by the story it serves.
The artists who shaped our musical thinking span a wide range deliberately. Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree showed us how the personal can become the universal in progressive music. Radiohead demonstrated that emotional weight and sonic experimentation don't require conventional structure — that a record can be both deeply affecting and completely unpredictable in how it gets there. Bands like Marillion, Riverside, and King Crimson built the template for long-form narrative music with genuine emotional intelligence. And the electronica and atmospheric production techniques that have defined the last two decades of forward-thinking rock gave us tools for texture and world-building that older prog didn't have access to.
The material demanded all of it. These were real people — Gene and Nick's grandparents. The music had to be worthy of what they actually lived through, which meant it could not be timid, nostalgic, or stylistically comfortable.
Beyond that, there's something that drives Nick specifically as a composer and producer: the obsessive desire to capture lightning in a bottle. The 16 Deadly Improvs work was about learning to catch great musical ideas in real time, unmediated. This album was the opposite discipline — the same obsessive ambition, applied to years of careful construction rather than real-time improvisation. Both approaches answer the same drive: to make something genuinely excellent as a piece of art — worthy of a listener's full, committed attention.
Q: What is the recording process like for the band?
A: It's genuinely international and genuinely collaborative in a way that wouldn't have been possible even fifteen years ago. Nick created the initial foundation — the "base music" — composing and demoing both guitar-based and keyboard-based pieces using GarageBand for iPad and Logic. Those demos were then brought into Logic at Rosemont Recordings Studio, where they were finalized, often retaining much of the original demo instrumentation because Nick had already captured something in those initial sessions worth keeping.
Dave Wilson was central to bringing those foundations to life:
"Some of the drumming was recorded in my home during Covid, and there were moments I thought we would never see the light of day. But I'm very proud of the drumming on this record — it is a true drum record. Military beats, electronic drums, all kinds of stuff. I felt that each different approach served the story we were telling."
From there, the process varied by track, but the general shape was consistent: drums — acoustic, electronic, or combinations of both — were recorded at Rosemont. Melodies were then developed separately by Kingston, Greystarr, and Mark Nowak, working from Gene's lyrics and from each other's ideas, and recorded in their own locations. The broader supporting cast — Kelly O'Donahue on horns, Neemias Texiera on piano, David Griffiths on string arrangement, Mark Wade on upright bass, Mariano on strings, Vin Villanueva on guitar — all recorded their contributions independently and sent them in. Jeff Bridi was the exception; his bass, guitars, and vocals were recorded at Rosemont directly.
The group's shared vision directed the overall arrangements throughout, with Nick handling the mixing. It's worth noting that several tracks had demos going back years, while others were added, refined, or completed within the final year based on feedback from the full cast. The album was mastered at Rosemont by Nick and Gene together.
What makes this unusual for a self-funded independent project is the sheer number of musicians involved across such a range of disciplines — and the fact that it was all coordinated without a label, a manager, or any conventional infrastructure, held together by shared commitment to the material and working relationships that in some cases stretch back to when we were all teenagers. The album was completed in parallel with other Rosemont projects — including new entries in the 16 Deadly Improvs series, A Collection of Dust, and The Ritual — which gives you some sense of how productive and relentless the Rosemont operation actually is.
Q: What made you want to release a concept album?
A: Two things collided at the right moment, and once they did, there was really no other form the project could take.
The first was the challenge we set ourselves. We wanted to make a modern progressive rock opera that could stand alongside the most ambitious works the genre has produced — and the concept album, with its theatrical scope and narrative arc, is the format most suited to that ambition. It demands everything: compositional range, lyrical depth, thematic unity, the ability to sustain a listener's attention across an entire journey rather than just a single track. If you're going to make your most serious artistic statement, a concept album is where you put it. And if you're building something that could ultimately live on a stage, you need a work with the structural integrity to survive the transition — scenes, characters, emotional arcs, a beginning and an end.
The second was the subject matter itself. The story of Gene and Nick's family — the Bohensky side fleeing the Bolsheviks across two decades and three countries, the Solodownikowa side taken prisoner and put to work in German factories, the Poljakow story of survival, betrayal, and the heartbreaking phone call in the 1970s — this material doesn't fit on a single track. It doesn't fit on an EP. It needs nearly 70 minutes because the history it inhabits spans decades and multiple catastrophes. The concept album format was the only container large enough to hold it.
What we were also very deliberate about was not making a straightforward narrative record. We didn't want to tell the story sequentially, like a documentary. We wanted to create a series of emotional scenes — vignettes of suffering, anxiety, faith, and endurance — that allow the listener to feel something of what these people lived through before they go looking for the historical context. The lyrics are intentionally oblique for that reason. The album rewards research, but it works as pure emotional music first. That balance — between the accessible and the layered, between the personal and the universal, between the album and the potential stage experience — is what we believe makes a concept work worth a listener's time.
Q: What other things should we know about the music? Anything you want our audience to know about?
A: A few things we'd want every listener to know before they press play.
First: this is entirely self-funded and self-directed. There's no label behind it, no promotional machine, no A&R filtering the creative decisions. Every choice on this album — the years of development, the international cast, the incorporation of a real historical document read aloud by a native Russian voice-over artist, the decision to put a question mark in the title of the most politically charged track — was made by us, without compromise, because we believed it was the right artistic call. For listeners who care about creative integrity, that matters.
Second: the vocalists — Kingston, Greystarr, Mark Nowak, and Jeff Bridi — gave extraordinary performances for material they may not have fully understood at the time of recording. Kingston and Greystarr, who carry the emotional weight of most of the album, recorded their parts without the full historical context of what the lyrics were referencing. That means they'll encounter the finished work, in all its weight and meaning, essentially as listeners for the first time — which we find remarkable, and which says something about the power of responding to lyrics on a purely human level even without the backstory.
Dave Wilson speaks to what the project ultimately meant to him as an artist:
"This is a true concept record — something I always wanted to do in my life. I feel it is one of the most fulfilling projects I've ever worked on. I've been part of many projects at Rosemont — Bald Red Lady, Body, To the Bone, The 16 Deadly Improvs, and others. But this one is different. I'm very proud of what we've built here."
Third, and perhaps most important: this album — and the stage musical we envision it becoming — is a direct challenge to the idea that independent music has to be modest in its ambitions. We gave ourselves a specific benchmark when we started: music that stands alongside the best that progressive rock, the theatrical tradition, and modern cinematic composition have ever produced. We worked across many years to meet it. We're not saying we succeeded. That's for listeners and audiences to judge. But we're saying we tried, seriously and without reservation, and that everything we had learned across a lifetime of making music together was poured into this record.
The forgotten roads of the title are real roads — walked by real people who are part of our family, and part of the larger family of everyone who has ever been displaced, hunted, imprisoned, or forced to choose between survival and identity. Those roads are being walked today, in other countries, by other families. If this music sends even a handful of listeners looking for the history behind it — for the church at Butovo, for the story of the White Russian exile communities, for what it meant to sign a declaration in a prisoner-of-war camp — then it has done something that music rarely gets to do. It has made the forgotten, remembered.
Visit us at www.scenesfromarevolution.com — and listen from the beginning, in one sitting, with the volume up.