James LaBrie Plows New Ground With Explorers Club

Singer contributes to prog-rock supergroup, promotes new live Dream Theater album

by: Bob Pierce

November 9th, 1998

James LaBrie is probably best known as the lead singer of Dream Theater, the band that quite possibly is keeping progressive rock alive and well in the commercial market. Now, count LaBrie in as a member of Explorers Club. The “supergroup” of progressive rock released their album Age Of Impact (Magna Carta) earlier this year.

LaBrie’s involvement in Explorers Club started after a Dream Theater show in California. “We were doing a show in Palo Alto, and Mike Varney and Trent Gardner were at the show,” LaBrie said prior to a recent concert in Tinley Park, Illinois. “I didn’t know this until after the show. We had a big after-show meet-and-greet. They came back and asked how I felt about getting involved in this project.

“I had actually been privy to it because [Dream Theater guitarist] John Petrucci had already started working on it with the guitar parts. He played me some of it, and what I had heard I really liked, so I said, ‘Absolutely.’ So, they got the tapes to me, and we set up some studio time, then I went in to do what I had to do.”

LaBrie said he was not aware of all of the people taking part in the project when he agreed to contribute vocals to it. “When I did this project, the only people I knew were involved were people like Steve Howe, Terry Bozzio and John Petrucci. So I was very much into it. I later on found out that D.C. Cooper came in...

“That’s usually, believe it or not, the way a lot of these projects happen. Because of everyone’s schedule, it’s very hard to be able to get people into one room at the same time. Everyone is involved in this or that, [or is] somewhere else in the world. It’s very difficult in that sense. Generally, the way these things happen is they send out these slave tapes, and then you go into whatever studio is most convenient for you. You do your section, and then you send it back, and they put it all together at a later date.

“Believe it or not, it’s probably... you have to understand, I’ve listened to this whole piece maybe three or four times. If I’m thinking correctly... I think it was ‘Time Enough.’ There was that whole section, not just the part where [Cooper] was singing, which I enjoyed the melody of it. I was more impressed with the melody that Trent had written. I really enjoyed all the instrumental sections going on around the whole piece, because it’s building there. It’s very dynamic.”

Although LaBrie has many words of praise for the final result of Age Of Impact, he admitted he wished he had a chance to develop his contribution more. “It came together real quick. I would have liked to have changed certain things like melodies, the way I approach it. But what I tried to do, and I told Trent this on something like this, where time is of the essence, I said I’m just going to try to add a lot of character or personality into it as much as I can, so that it doesn’t come out sounding sterile or contrived, or anything like that. All this came about when I was on tour at the time. We were going through the States. I had to pick a day that we had off, and I went in and sang on one of my days off in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

“But I would have liked to have approached this very different. I just finished singing two tracks for the Emerson, Lake and Palmer tribute coming up. I did ‘Tarkus’ and I did ‘A Time And A Place’. And with those, it was different, because I was at home, and they sent me the tapes. I was able to sit down with them and listen to what Robert Berry – he’s one of the producers – had sung, and then I took it and I enhanced upon what he had already laid down on the scratch vocals, so that I could make it more soulful and more emotional.”

How does taking part in such a project as Explorers Club differ from the singing style that LaBrie has with Dream Theater? “This was much more immediate. It was like, ‘Here it is, this is what we’d like you to do, can you do it as soon as possible?’ So, it wasn’t so much time of nurturing it and building it and forming it into something more mature. Not to say that’s immature. the great thing about doing something like this is that you have to rise to the occasion. You have to say, ‘Okay, here it is, this is what they’ve given me, this is what they want, but they want me to also put my own self into it.’ So you have to become professional, not to sound conceited, but you’ve got to get to what they’re expecting from you. So I went in there and I approached it like that.

“The way I like to do it when I’m approaching Dream Theater material is I’m writing with the guys, we’re forming the melody, we’re forming the lyrics, and at all times I’m looking at this piece and starting to build a character towards that vocal, so that when it comes time for me to record I’m completely immersed in that zone.”

While LaBrie sees some better days for the progressive rock genre, he said there has to be a shift in focus in the industry to continue to allow bands like Dream Theater and to help break projects like Explorers Club to reach mass markets the way modern music does today. “I think it’s making a comeback in one sense, and that is the fact that there are more bands out there taking a progressive approach to compositions,” he said. “But, I think that it’s being received in the industry standard; the same way it has been, unfortunately, for a long time, and that is that radio, video, MTV, are not respondent to it as we’d like to see them. Because unfortunately, the way most of the industry runs, it runs on something playing it safe, something that’s bubblegum, something that’s a no-brainer, and let’s not make these people think, let’s make them groove, or whatever. And it’s not even groove-oriented, to be honest with you, most of the shit out there.

“So, I think, unfortunately, it’s still taking a back seat, and I think it’s still very difficult for bands. We’re very fortunate in the sense that we’ve sold a lot of albums and we continue to sell a lot of albums, and we continue to grow our fan base worldwide. This tour has been very, very successful. We’ve been out almost a year now, and we’ve played in many, many new markets of the world, and it’s really paid off for us. Right now we’re approaching going with new management that could be extremely exciting. We have a double live album coming out in October. Things are going really well, but I think I still am able to detach myself from what’s happening in the Dream Theater world and look at it from a more realistic perspective. And that is that I still think that radio is completely; we’ve been lucky with radio, too, in the States, where they’ve gotten on tracks and pushed them, but there’s just so much else out there. I mean, the market is saturated. It really is. So the first thing that kind of goes by the wayside is progressive music or anything that has length to it or that is somewhat thought-provocative.

“I don’t know. I still think there’s so much more to appreciate from this kind of music and there’s so much more to be conquered. I mean, we’re out with Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Deep Purple. But they came around when the environment was amazing. I mean, radio was open arms to it. There wasn’t as many bands out there or many genres of music as there are today. So, these bands would build albums, and it wouldn’t be, ‘Hey, man, can you play this? If you play this, then I’ll bring you Metallica. If you do this, I’ll bring you the next Page & Plant.’ Back then, it was, ‘Hey, when are you gonna get the new album to us? We need it. We want it now. We want it yesterday.’ And that’s how it happened, and a lot of these bands, that’s how their fortune came from, that radio was very respondent. And it did it, it allowed them to catapult their careers so that longevity became a reality.”

So does LaBrie think that a “revolution” in music is happening the way that alternative rock came forth thanks to former college radio DJs? “I think it is happening,” he said. “I mean, you do find that a lot of college and university radio stations do play stuff like this, and it’s great. And there are a lot of fanzines that are out there that are great. I mean, even people like yourselves. If it wasn’t for that, a lot of this stuff wouldn’t be made aware to the masses. Seriously. It’s unbelievable, because even a lot of the big mags that are out there, the national magazines that are out there, they’re very, ‘Okay, what’s the flavor of the month? Who’s in? Who’s gonna sell? Who can we put on the front cover that the kids are going to relate to and identify with?’“

LaBrie said that the numerous side projects that members of Dream Theater have worked on in the past – Petrucci and drummer Mike Portnoy were also a part of Liquid Tension Experiment, and keyboardist Derek Sherinian also took part in Explorers Club – have only served to help Dream Theater as a band. “I think it brings something new into the individual in that we’re able to work with other people,” he said.

“So, in a sense, I think that you grow individually and you learn how to interact amongst other musicians. And it is, it’s a very evolutional type process. I think that it just helps in the sense of when we get back together and we collaborate, there might be a different approach or direction that we might take than we would have if we hadn’t worked with other people and seen how they approach the whole writing process and the whole creation of a piece.

“So, I think it’s good. The only way it could be bad is that if we started hearing things on those projects, and we’re going, ‘Wait a minute, wasn’t that something that we were working on?’ But it’s not like that, because fortunately, we have so many ideas and so much stuff on tape already for when we want to approach the new album that it’s never that we’re shy of music or material. In fact, we’ve always been fortunate enough to have a surplus of it, and it’s more like sitting down and going, ‘Wow, let’s listen to all this stuff and see what really reaches out and touches us,’ and then take that and build on it.”

LaBrie said that Dream Theater’s first live album, Once In A Livetime, is the end product of one amazing concert the band recently played. “When we were on our last European tour, we did two nights where we had camera shoots and we had the mobile unit out back of the venue recording it. We had the producer, Kevin Shirley, who did our last album [Falling Into Infinity]. He flew over and he was there both nights to oversee the whole recording process and make sure everything went to tape properly. We did night one night in Rotterdam, and that was more of an acoustic setting, and the second night was done in Paris. Most of, if not all, I believe, of Once In A Livetime was from the Paris show. And what it was, was that we did a three-and-a-half hour show. We went out, did an hour and forty-five minutes, took a fifteen minute break, had some oranges – we’re like a soccer team, you know, in the back of the room there trying to regenerate our energies – and then we went back out and did another hour and forty-five minutes.

“It came out amazing, and Kevin took it, mixed it, and mastered it. It will come out October 27th, which is my wife’s birthday. Simultaneously, we’re supposed to have a video that comes out; that will incorporate pretty well what’s gone on in many different ways basically the last five years of Dream Theater, what we’ve been going through. You’ll see a lot of behind the scenes stuff, stuff on stage, maybe some of the stuff from Rotterdam.”

Special thanks to: Chip Ruggieri, Dan Hanley, Michelle Gutenstein.