Back From The Asylum

When you look back at Dream Theater’s catalogue of recorded material, “ambitious” is the word that immediately springs to mind. After all, this is a band that has released 50-minute Eps, multiple-disc live sets – the most recent of which topped the three-hour mark – and a concept album that barely fits within the confines of a single compact disc.

Then there’s the abundance of side projects involving the group’s members. Liquid Tension Experiment, Platypus, Transatlantic and Mullmuzzler have each released two full-length records, and even keyboardist Jordan Rudess tested the solo waters this past year. In a way then, it was only to be expected that some day, a lone, 80-minute CD just wouldn’t suffice for the band anymore. What wasn’t expected was that it would happen so soon, with the studio album immediately succeeding 1999’s Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From A Memory.

Bands typically tread one of two paths after releasing concept albums: they either follow up with another concept album, or they attempt to distance themselves from such recordings by releasing a straightforward studio record. With their new double CD Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, Dream Theater does neither. The first disc is traditional – or as traditional as a CD with three songs longer than 10 minutes can be. But the second disc features the 42-minute title track, a tale of mental instability as told by six different characters.

So is Six Degrees a concept album? That question might be debated by Dream Theater’s rabid fanbase for some time. But the band says making another conceptual piece was the last thing on their mind. “When we started this record, we didn’t intend on having this big 40-minute track,” drummer Mike Portnoy insists. “We were so gung-ho on not doing another concept album, and it’s pretty ironic that we ended up with another big concept piece. It wasn’t in the plans.”

The record’s roots can be traced back to the Scenes From A Memory sessions, when the band – coming off Falling Into Infinity – shunned the singles mindset and felt they had something to prove. “When we made Scenes, there was a do-or-die mentality,” Portnoy says. “We were finally given the green light to do whatever the hell we wanted, so we took the music exactly where we wanted to go. John (Petrucci, guitarist) and I took the reigns as producers and basically ran the show. It was an incredibly liberating experience artistically, but we were wondering where it was going to take us, and there was always that question mark in the back of our minds: How is this going to be received, both artistically and commercially?”

“Artistically, It seems that the fans loved it – it seems unanimous that it’s one of their favourite albums, if not their favourite. Commercially, it sold well and the tour was an incredible success, and the label was very happy in that department. So, this time around, the mentality was, ‘OK – now we know that it works. Now we’re finally being given the green light without a question mark. Now they’re finally letting us do our own thing.’ We went in very happy and were comfortable to be able to run the show.”

But Portnoy admits he had no idea what musical direction Dream Theater would take. “It’s the same as any record we make – we don’t really know what we’re going to do until we’re doing it. When we made Scenes, we knew it was going to be a concept album, but that was about it. With this record, we just started writing songs, and we didn’t feel anybody breathing down our necks. We didn’t feel any time restrictions – we booked BearTracks Studios for most of the year – so we were comfortable in the situation where we had plenty of studio time to work with, and we could work it out on tape.”

“We just started writing,” he continues, “and when we start writing without anybody breathing down our necks, inevitably we’re going to turn out very long songs. That’s exactly what happened: we ended up writing a group of long songs, and experimenting musically and sonically as well. We just took it wherever it went, completely on our own timetable and on our own terms.”

Initially, the band wrote five songs – the five tracks that constitute the first Six Degrees disc. But Portnoy knew the band couldn’t get away with releasing a record that clocked in at a mere 55 minutes. “We had a couple more weeks of studio time booked, so I suggested to the guys, ‘Why don’t we finish up the album with one really big song in the 20-minute zone?’ – something in the vein of ‘A Change Of Seasons’. So we started writing it, and the thing just kept growing and growing. The next thing we knew, it was 40 minutes long by the time we got to where we wanted to end it.”

The group then realized it had outgrown the compact disc. “It became obvious at that point that it was going to be a double album, because we didn’t want to drop any of the material that we worked all year making,” Portnoy explains. “Because the songs are so long, to make it fit onto a single CD, it was going to have to drop down to a four-track album, which would have totally ruined the balance. Every song fulfills a certain style or a certain writing direction or sonic experiment, and if you take any one of them out of the big picture, you lose the balance that we intended to be heard.”

With Dream Theater’s history of making jam-packed CDs, some might have guessed that a double album by the band would feature two full-length discs, with both topping 75 minutes. “I think that if we went into the studio knowing we had the green light for a double album, we probably would have done that,” Portnoy says. “We would have recorded some different types of jams or some different solo pieces to round out and fill up the CDs. But what came out naturally is what’s here, those 95 minutes. And when you look at all the classic double albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s – everything from the White Album to Tommy and Quadrophenia, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Wall, Physical Graffiti – all of those albums are around 80 minutes.”

Portnoy co-wrote the lyrics to the title track. “I view it almost as a miniature Scenes From A Memory,” he says. “Once you have a song of that magnitude, lyrically, you have to have some sort of concept to tie it all together. It deals with mental instability or manic depression – different kinds of mental ailments. Basically, there are six characters, and I wrote about three of them and John wrote about three of them. I view it as almost a walk through an asylum or an institution, where you’re actually walk from room to room and meeting these different characters and seeing the things that are going through their minds. They’re six very different types of people – three women, three men, from different backgrounds, different age groups, and they’re all dealing with different inner turmoil. You’re hearing six different stories, but at the same time, you’re seeing how there’s many similarities in the emotions they’re going through in their struggles.”

Petrucci says that although the band first dealt with the subject of mental illness on their 1994 album Awake, the subject continued to fascinate him. “When I was writing ‘Erotomania’ and ‘Voices’, I got turned on to a bunch of medical journals, and found that the word choices and the imagery and the whole concept of delving into the internal workings of our psyche was very interesting. With ‘Six Degrees’, I was able to do some research once again and find specific disorders to write about. I read books and case studies on depression, schizophrenia, multiple personalities and anxiety. Some of it was a little gruesome.”

The song is divided into eight parts but unlike A Change Of Seasons, which was tracked as one continuous suite, ‘Six Degrees’ features chapter breaks. “I toyed with that idea for many weeks – do we put ID’s, or do we make it one track,” Portnoy says. “I think it would have started to make people absolutely f***ing nuts to have to sit there holding their scan buttons to hear something 25 minutes into the song. It would have been really satisfying to look up at that CD player and see the 40-minute mark scroll up, but I think that ultimately, once that novelty wore off after a couple of listens, it would be a real pain in the ass to have to scroll through the whole thing every time you wanted to hear a certain part.”

So how will the song be treated in concert? “We’ll start off doing it in its entirety, and then maybe years down the road, we can break it up into pieces,” Portnoy says. “I guess doing a 40-minute chunk will not be as confining as a 90-minute chunk like we were doing every night on the last tour. But even this time around, I don’t think we’re going to be playing it for the first couple months of the tour. At that point, the album will only have just come out, and it would be too much to expect the audience to sit through a 40-minute song they’re only just getting to know.”

Petrucci says concertgoers can definitely expect to hear the intense ‘Glass Prison’, however. “There’s something about the heavier songs being played live, and it was the first song we wrote (for Six Degrees). We wanted something that was really heavy, because it’s part of our personality as a band. The concept behind the piece was just to have a nonstop riffing frenzy.”

That song was the Six Degrees track most widely available on the Internet prior to the album’s release. “I’ve always said all along that you can’t judge a Dream Theater album y one song,” Portnoy says. “That’s why MP3s make me crazy, because people are hearing ‘The Glass Prison’, which is relentless and ball-to-the-wall. Somebody that’s only going to hear that is going to say, ‘Wow what the f*** happened to Dream Theater? They turned into Pantera!’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, we did – for about 14 minutes. But you’ve got to hear the other 80 minutes of the album to really understand where we’re at right now. You need the big picture to really balance what the band’s about.”

One of the album’s other tracks, ‘The Great Debate’, deals with the decidedly untraditional rock ‘n’ roll topic of stem-cell research. Petrucci penned the lyrics, and he notes that the song contrasts religious, moral and scientific issues. “As I was writing about it, I was questioning my own (beliefs),” he says. “I can say I’m a Roman Catholic, and that there should be no genetic manipulation at all. But sometimes I wonder that if we were all really put here by God and we’re doing these things, maybe that’s all part of His plan – for us to figure this stuff out.”

Meanwhile, the minimalist ballad ‘Disappear’ evokes the same mood as Awake’s closing track, ‘Space-Dye Vest’. “The concept behind that was to really get creative with the production, and how we orchestrated,” Petrucci says. “The tracking of the song started with the guitar and the piano, and everything was built on top of that. All the others start with the drum and bass tracks. It’s definitely different – at one point, there’s a cacophonous guitar on the left side and a harp on the other side, so it’s a complete contrast in orchestration.”

Cacophonous guitars also appear prominently in ‘Misunderstood’. “In the middle and ending sections, I thought that to play something over it, it would have to be something that was a little bit different, as opposed to blowing through with a solo,” Petrucci says of the feedback-drenched passage. “The lyrical subject is pretty intense, so the ending made sense – it’s sort of supposed to be hell.”

“In a way,” he continues, “I almost feel like we never really got to a traditional-type of Dream Theater track on this record. There’s no ‘Home’ or ‘Pull Me Under’ – no driving tracks like that. Even ‘Blind Faith’ is a little different orchestration-wise and in the types of instrument we used – 8-string bass, baritone guitar. But we did some really cool edits that turned out great, that I think would be great for singles. One was for ‘Misunderstood’, one was for ‘Blind Faith’, one was for (the ‘Six Degrees’ chapter) ‘Solitary Shell’. It’s a matter of the label actually releasing them as such.”

A warm-up show in New York City notwithstanding, Dream Theater kicks off its Six Degrees tour in Europe, and then returns to America for a 15-city, major market tour in March. The band then heads to the Far East before returning to Europe for select summer festivals. They will also launch a full-scale headline tour of the States at some point, possibly during the summer if they don’t take an opening slot on a package tour. Portnoy promises memorable performances. “We’re at the stage in our career where we have too many songs to possibly nail into one set list, so we’re basically going to switch it up and do completely different set lists every night,” he says. “It’s going to be a lot of fun for me, and for the fans.”

Now that they’ve released a concept record, a double album, a 3CD live set and a DVD within a two-year span, no less – what could the future possibly hold for Dream Theater? “With every album,” Petrucci says, “two things happen: we become better as songwriters and as players, and at the same time, you learn from the mistakes you make as you go. I think we’re at a good point now, but I don’t think we’ve reached our peak.”

“So far in our career, we’ve been lucky to never have a dry well,” Portnoy says. “There’s never been a lack of ideas, especially if you put me, John and Jordan in a room together. I always have to have a DAT machine running to capture the things we’re throwing around. Sometimes, I’ll have to go home at the end of the day and listen to my DAT to discover a couple of great things we stumbled upon that would have gotten lost in the shuffle. We’ve never really had a problem finding that creative spark.”