Falling Into Infinity: In Conversation With Mike Portnoy

In August I spoke with Mike on the recently completed, but as yet unreleased new album, to get his thoughts and reactions to how things went down in putting it all together in the studio.

The recording went well?

Amazingly well. The material is great. I’m totally totally 100% satisfied with it.

Kevin Shirley worked out well then?

I loved working with him. At first, he and I were fighting a lot. I was being very protective over the songs and arrangements, and he wanted to make changes. We ended up getting along great. I loved working with him, he was really cool. Everything sounds amazing; it’s the best sounding album we’ve ever done.

Has the material changed drastically from the demos?

Not drastically. ‘Take Away My Pain’ has been changed drastically. That’s a completely new song now – like a Peter Gabriel thing! Other than that, nothing too drastic. ‘Burning My Soul’: the middle section was taken out and made – as you know – an instrumental, so that’s changed but it’s still there, just separated. It actually comes after ‘Burning’, so it doesn’t really interrupt the flow. A couple other minor changes, but for the most part it’s the songs that you know. Obviously ‘You Not Me’ was changed.

What was Desmond Child’s involvement?

The thing was that we weren’t going to use ‘You Or Me’, so as far as I was concerned, it was a track that was going to be thrown away. Kevin asked me: “What do you think about Desmond looking at this song?” I guess that Kevin worked with him with Aerosmith, and I thought about it and, it’s like normally there’s not a hope in hell we’d work with an outside writer. But it was a song that already existed, already written, and we’re not even planning on using it, so if he wants to mess with it, let’s see what he comes up with.

So basically, he changed some lyrics with John, and changed the key of the chorus, which we ended up changing to a different key anyway, and just minor changes, as the music is pretty much intact. The way I saw it was, his contributions are not much different from the role of what a producer would be: taking an existing song and making suggestions.

What singles are planned?

First single going to radio, but we’re not gonna do a video, and it’s not being released commercially, but first to radio to get the ball rolling is ‘Burning My Soul’. We’ll take it step by step from there, but everyone at the label is really excited about ‘Hollow Years’; they think it’s got a lot of potential. The general vibe is that once we set up the album with ‘Burning’, let everybody know we’re back, then ‘Hollow Years’ will be the first big single they want to push. From there, who knows? ‘You Not Me’ could definitely be a single. ‘Just Let Me Breathe’ a contender.

I was surprised how much you got on the album. Initial thoughts were that ‘You Not Me’ and ‘Anna Lee’ would not make it! And it’s another lengthy one!

Yeah, I think everything else on the album we were planning putting on, and it was those two that we didn’t think would make it, but Kevin really like both of them, and I’m glad to see ‘Anna Lee’ on there because it’s one of my favorites. Seventy-eight minutes, pushed to the max. And the cassette version is going to be full length as well, unlike with ‘Awake’.

What about the Japanese version and the extra material?

It will have a bonus CD, just like last time. We’re using all demos for B-sides and bonus tracks. It will have the demo version of ‘Take Away My Pain’ just so you can hear the difference in the original to the finished piece, and ‘Speak To Me’.

The album artwork?

It’s pretty different. Storm Thorgerson did it; he’s someone we’ve always wanted to work with, and it looks very Floyd-ish, sort of ‘Division Bell’ vibe to it. It’s pretty simplistic. Storm’s stuff at times can be simplistic where it is just one image, and it’s not like some of the other artwork: cluttered with a million images; it’s a whole new look. Even the DT font, the lettering is different now.

Did you give him ideas as to what you wanted, or did he have a free range?

We gave him the title, the lyrics, and all the demos, and he came back with about twelve different sketches, all different possible covers, and we just chose the one we liked the best. His covers were everything from really elaborate, incorporating pieces of lyrics, like we’ve always done, moving from that down to completely simple one-element designs. We looked at them all, talked with him and chose the one we thought was most eye-catching.

How did the album title come, and the change from the original idea?

I think having sat with ‘Stream Of Consciousness’ for the whole year gave everybody a chance to second guess themselves. John Petrucci and myself still wanted to call it ‘Stream Of Consciousness’, but the other guys were starting to think it was too pompous. So, we had to rethink an album titled, and we did the usual of going through all the lyrics method; nothing really knocked us out. So this is the first time that an album titled isn’t stemmed from any of the lyrics. We actually toyed with the idea of just calling it ‘Dream Theater’ because of the many changes and different approach, but we figured that was a cop-out, and actually John P. had the idea of ‘Falling Into Infinity’; he brought that in and we all liked it.

Is there any leftover material that didn’t make it onto the album that you recorded, or is that entirely it?

Well, as far as the songs go, we had our hands full getting these 78 minutes done!

So you’re off to South America soon?

We’re going there September 9th – 16th for one week playing three shows: two in São Paulo and one in Rio, with the possibility of one extra being added. We’re doing our own shows with 4000 seaters, so, a bit of an audience for us down there. I’m also doing a couple of drum clinics.

Hopefully, a lot of people will be discovering this ‘brand new’ band when the album comes out!

I feel really good about the record; it’s a nice breakthrough for us.