Mike Portnoy interview

Mike Portnoy: Octavarium is very much a response to our previous album, Train of Thought. Train of Thought was very dark and heavy, and so this time around we wanted to do something that was a little different from that. This is more traditional of Dream Theater to have a balance and styles.

We’re a combination of progressive bands like Pink Floyd and Yes and Rush, Genesis. And also the other spectrum was the metal side, which were bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. So that’s the common ground that Dream Theater based our initial sound off of. We still have those kind of influences, but I think we’ve definitely created a style of our own music through the years.

We have a tradition that I thought of a few years ago where whenever we do two nights in the same venue, on the second night, we would play a classic album in its entirety. As you know we’re playing two nights here in São Paulo; I decided to cover one of our classic albums from start to finish. So tomorrow night we’ll be doing the entire Scenes From a Memory album because we never had a chance to do that here in Brazil, so we’ll do it this time.

I guess maybe we strike a chord with the South American fans. This whole tour has been very, very successful for us, and we came to Brazil back in ‘97 for the first time, and even back, then the response was tremendous so we couldn’t wait to come back.