Liquid Tension Experiment – Part 2

We’ve heard about the project from Mike’s angle – here’s John’s!

Did you have ideas yourself where you wanted to go musically with this project?

Originally I was approached to do something very different from this. They wanted me to do like a covers-type album of bands I was influenced by, with great players. So that’s what I was looking at, and when I talked to Mike – I think he was going to do an original thing – so we decided to combine the projects. So, so far as any preconceptions, I had no idea.

Was it a case of the four of you throwing around ideas to see what came out?

Totally. I was a little nervous about it, how we were going to pull it off. I didn’t know whether it would turn out kinda free-form sounding or what.

Paradigm Shift – and to an extent Kindred Spirits – open and end with some savage guitar work, with a more melodically structured solo in between. Were you consciously trying to keep away from the Dream Theater feel?

No, I think it was written very similar to the way Dream Theater writes. Just real off the cuff throwing out riffs and licks and ideas, and piecing them together. So, it wasn’t trying to keep away from what we do at all; it was playing the way I naturally play and interact with those guys.

The combination of your guitar work and the keyboards work really well together on several tracks. Jordan comes up with so many excellent sounds and textures throughout the album. And for me, he’s a shining light on that album.

Cool. Yeah, he’s pretty unbelievable. He’s really a superior musician, it’s ridiculous! You just gotta watch him play by himself. If you just listen to him play, he’ll blow your mind.

A perfect example being State of Grace – the guitar sound all through the track is wonderful, coupled with Jordan’s keys – it just floats along, and the five minutes is gone so quickly.

The way that came about, I just started playing a melody and he just joined in and heard where it was going. We were like: ‘It kinda sounds like a Disney song!’ Then we just took it and within ten minutes, it was written. That’s how this record was.

I think that track contains some of your best work on the album. I love the whole track; it’s wonderful.

Thanks. I like that track, too. I think I’d like to hear that orchestrated or something, or sun even with lyrics.

The same can be said of Universal Mind. The combination works well again. And it has a slight Kansas feel to it at the start!

Yeah, I think some of those riffs are Jordan’s lines, and I think those more keyboard-oriented lines have that early Kansas sound, definitely.

The Stretch – you get the funky jazz feel in this.

I didn’t play on that.

Now Mike told me that you didn’t do the solo, but I thought you still played on the rest.

No, I didn’t play at all. I was holding my ears when they were doing it. I think we were getting ready to jam or something, and normally when we jam in that close environment, I’ll have headphones on, or something to protect my ears, but I remember I didn’t have any protection when those guys were playing and I was waiting for them to stop. Then they ended up using it.

Three Minute Warning – a wonderful improv, with each of you feeding off one another. How much longer would that have gone on, time permitting?

Jams like that can go on forever. I think we were getting hungry after a while.

You can hear that it’s an improv; it works well with one section flowing into the next with someone starting another groove and the others feeding off.

Exactly. In that type of instance, you have to really use your ears and pick up on tonal things that are going on. You sometimes have to lay back and know when to hold them, know when to fold them, and it helps playing with all those guys because they’re so creative; they can do that forever, coming up with new ideas and keeping it interesting.

Overall, the album has a mixture of blues, jazz, funk, etc. sitting alongside the more regular rock elements. Something that takes you a little way away from what perhaps even DT would do. It would be interesting to see and hear played live. Any chances of that happening? And with Platypus as well?

We’ve talked about it. I’m sure we’ll do it someday. Somewhere intimate, and I think that will be a good night of music.

Onto a couple Dream Theater questions to finish things off: with Take Away My Pain, you changed the last verse. Was it because of the Jesus reference and that it would not sit right?

I wasn’t comfortable with what I was saying there. I liked it in one way, but then it really didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t like what I was saying. I wanted to have everything hit home, and you could understand it as you were reading it. And that one verse just seemed a little too obscure to me.

Did you write several additional verses for it, as on last year’s Xmas disc, James sings some other different lyrics to the original and the finished song.

Yeah, I did. I wrote several until I got it. Actually, it took me a while. I had to dig down deep to get that, and it was weird doing it, because I had to put myself back into the feeling and it was really hard to do, but finally got something out of it. It went through several incarnations.

Also, the general style and feel of the finished song changed quite drastically from the demo version and live sound. Personally, I prefer the original.

You do? It’s just a different interpretation. I wasn’t exactly sure how I heard it, but I knew that I wanted it to be different. I thought it was kinda typical just the way we had it, like too overly dramatic. So I was trying to get away from that.

How close are we to seeing Metropolis part II recorded and released?

We definitely wrote all the music to it. I’m still in a position where I haven’t written the lyrics. I just really put it on the back burner, and we’ve certainly talked about putting it on our next album. It depends – if we do that, then we have 25 minutes of the album done, and it will be cool. That is a possibility.

You can just imagine the critics!

Yeah.

The coming months are outlined with the Deep Purple/ELP support slot throughout August and September. It’s going to be an interesting remainder of the year, with hopefully greater exposure. Plans after that?

So far as touring, that is it. Then we want to write and record as soon as possible. We don’t want to take a lot of time to do it. Try and get in to the circumstance where we can write and record at the same time, which I think would be real experimental, but it comes down to whether the label will give us the permission to do that without hearing material, lining up the producer...

Apart from Metropolis, is there any ideas that you’ve got?

There’s a lot. Whenever we tour, at soundchecks, whatever, we jam on riffs and we always tape it. So we already have a library of some really cool grooves and chord progressions and things. There’s never a shortage of ideas.