So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica Live is being released this Friday! After a 10 year wait for Bear McCreary and BSG fans, the live album presents 13 tracks of BSG music that were recorded at sold-out performances in North America and Europe. Plus the soundtracks for all four seasons of Ronald D. Moore and David Eick’s SciFi series have been digitally remastered and will be available on your favorite streaming music services for the first time.

There’s a new video of McCreary and Starbuck herself—Katee Sackhoff (Mandalorian)—performing the famous All Along the Watchtower track live. (The song is by Bob Dylan, made famous by Jimmy Hendrix, and reimagined by Bear)

Katee Sackhoff and Bear recreate a pivotal scene from season 4 of Battlestar live on stage.

In an interview with io9 McCreary talked about how passionate he is about the music he composed around 18 years ago, when BSG was his first major gig. Bear said:

“When I started releasing albums for Battlestar Galactica, I realized that I just really loved this music. It wasn’t just a job to me. I connected to it on such a deep, personal level, it was my life! I was in my early 20s at the time and my wife and brother sang on the score, and a lot of my best friends and favorite musicians all played on the score. There was a social aspect to it that I wanted to bring to the stage.”

“So in season two, we did a little concert for the soundtrack release, and it exceeded my expectations, to say the least—people were packed into this little club in west Los Angeles. That started a yearly tradition where every year we would get together and play the score, and the concerts just got bigger and bigger. By the end of the run, in 2009 and 2010, we were doing really large shows that felt like giant rock concerts. Fans flew in from around the world and we would do signings afterward and interact and talk with people. There really isn’t anything else like being able to play the music live in front of an audience and get their reaction.”

“At the end of the show, to be perfectly honest with you, I realized that there was a version of my life moving forward where I could start touring this around the world because there were people everywhere who wanted to hear the music of Battlestar Galactica live, but it would be at the expense of continuing my career as a composer. I chose to focus my efforts on continuing my career as a composer for film and television. As a result, the live concerts kind of went away. I always intended to return to them and find a way to make it possible for fans to experience those concerts again, or experience them for the first time. I can’t believe that it took me a decade, but here we are.”

I was at many of those events, from small clubs to big events at Comic-Con. They stand with the greatest live concerts I’ve ever heard. Intense, kaleidoscopic, brimming with world instruments, rock band, electronica, mellow acoustics, soaring vocals. Huge world-shaking climaxes. Everybody on stage and in the audience were on the same wavelength and locked in. There was an ecstatic vibe, with 15+ musicians sounding like a sci-fi symphony.

The players were among LA’s finest, including members of Oingo Boingo, an electric string quartet and electric Oud, plus a massive percussion battery including multiple Taikos, Gongs, and a rock drummer (Vatos). It was a pinnacle of screen music concerts.

“I’ve been focused with a Captain Ahab-like obsession on my career but I realized that I really needed that emotional impulse to share music with people in real-time. It’s not a coincidence that now that my career is where it is, that I’m revisiting these old concerts, and I’m preparing new live concerts of this [live album] and other material. I’ve realized how badly I need that kind of live interaction with fans in my life. I need to share music in real-time with people or I’m going to go crazy!”

So Say We All: Battlestar Galactica Live will be available on June 4 at McCreary’s Sparks & Shadows site alongside the four original Battlestar Galactica soundtracks, all five of which have been digitally remastered. They’ll also finally be available via streaming services as well. A limited number of So Say We All albums signed by McCreary will be available June 8.

Here’s the tracklist:

1. A Distant Sadness
2. Prelude To War
3. Baltar’s Dream
4. Roslin and Adama
5. Apocalypse
6. Fight Night
7. Something Dark Is Coming
8. Wander My Friends
9. Lords Of Kobol
10. Storming New Caprica
11. Heeding The Call
12. All Along The Watchtower
13. Colonial Anthem / Black Market

For more, head to the composer’s blog at BearMcCreary.com for his eloquent posts that chronicle creating scores for shows like BSG, The Walking Dead, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Outlander.

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