Mike Portnoy interview

Javier Abrego: Tell us about the European tour and Spain.

Mike Portnoy: It’s freezing. We were in Madrid and Barcelona, it was beautiful. I was back in my shorts and now I’m back in my sweatshirt. The shows here in Spain have been awesome. We really can see the growth from album to album. Every time we come here, the audiences get bigger and better, and there’s always a lot of passion from the Spanish audience. You can really feel it on stage. Actually the record company has been asking for some live tracks to use for promotion, and I was so happy with last night’s show that I’m going to pull a few tracks from the show in Madrid.

JA: Systematic Chaos are individual songs; will we hear a new DT concept album?

MP: Yeah, it’s possible. When we wrote Scenes From A Memory, it was written in that order and it kind of felt like it was one big piece. Also the second disc of Six Degrees was conceptual – that was written as one big piece. So yeah, it’s possible that we could do another concept album in the future. To me, it’s a very artistically satisfying way to make a record. All of my favorite albums are concept albums, from other bands. To me, the only negative side of it is that you’re expected to play it that way live on stage, and after the Scenes From A Memory tour, after playing the same thing 100 nights in a row, it made me f***ing crazy. So that’s the only downside of it, but it’s possible that we could continue doing something like that in the future.

JA: Metropolis part 3?

MP: No no no.

JA: You made a lot singing in Systematic Chaos.

I’ve been singing on really every album since Scenes From A Memory, everything from ‘The Glass Prison’, so I don’t think it’s anything new. Maybe it’s more predominantly noticeable on tracks like ‘Dark Eternal Night’ and ‘Constant Motion’ just because for the heavier tracks, I think it was important to have some kind of balls. James has a naturally high operatic voice, so I think my voice helps ground it a little bit and give it a little bit more street power.

JA: Do you enjoy it?

MP: Yeah, I mean only because live I get bored playing drums. I need something else to keep me busy.

JA: Why you decided to write lyrics about AA?

MP: Well, I am writing lyrics based on that because it’s something that’s part of my life that has helped me. So to write about it helps me even more. I have always written lyrics about things out of my life. To me, it’s been a good topic to write about. It’s been very therapeutic for me because I’ve been sober now for seven and a half years, and to write about it is just therapeutic. This latest album has steps eight and nine, so there’s three left, and I hope to complete that on the next album and be over and done with the whole project.

JA: More acoustic shows like Rotterdam 1998?

MP: Yeah, we really enjoyed it. In fact, so much so that we did five shows like that in America later that year. And yeah, it was fun because it wasn’t really unplugged. It was just more intimate. John was still playing electric, I was still playing drums, but scaled down. But it was fun. For me, it was mainly fun because I was able to write a setlist that was different, more of the ballad songs. Also, I put a lot of unreleased and B-sides into the setlist, and also a lot of cover tunes like Elton John and Pink Floyd. So it was fun. Would we do it again? Sure. It’s not in any immediate plans, but of course anything can happen at any time.

JA: What do you enjoy the most – studio or live?

MP: No question, for me personally, I prefer live. For me, [the] studio is a good creative environment, but it’s basically us just playing to four walls. It’s very artistically satisfying situation, but you’re making music that people aren’t gonna hear for many, many months down the road. I like the immediate satisfaction of being on stage and being able to interact with an audience and feel the response.

JA: You love symphonic rock and movies; are you a soundtrack fanatic too?

MP: To be honest, I’m a huge film fan, a film fanatic, but one of [the] least interesting sides of that [for me] is the musical score. That’s not something I pay attention to. When I’m watching film, I’m paying more attention to the direction, the cinematography, the editing, everything that the director was a part of. For me, it’s a visual thing. But Dream Theater has always been excited by the prospect of scoring a film instrumentally. If you listen to a lot of our instrumental music dating all the way back to ‘Eve’ all the way up to the ‘Six Degrees Overture’, that’s very, very cinematic sounding music. And if you listen to Liquid Tension Experiment, some of the improvisational stuff, or especially this Liquid Trio Experiment [CD] that was just released. The improv side of Dream Theater has always been very cinematic. So we would do it in a heartbeat if we were offered the right situation.

JA: Let’s talk about the relationship between the members.

MP: The relationship between the five members is the best it’s ever been. In fact, ever since Jordan joined the band ten years ago, nine years ago, we get along better than ever. There’s a chemistry between the five of us that is really incredibly strong. But we’re very, very different personalities. All five of us are very different people, but I think that’s what makes the chemistry. The fact that John Myung and myself are probably polar opposites in terms of personality, you would think that that’s a bad thing, but in this case it’s a good thing. It makes us work. The way that this band functions, the division of power and responsibility, everybody’s very comfortable with it. Some people look at me like, ‘Oh, he’s a dictator,’ and doesn’t the band get mad that I’m controlling everything, but actually it makes this band work incredibly smoothly. We don’t fight and bicker over every little thing. Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do in their place and as a result we get along bigger and better than ever.

JA: About producing your albums.

MP: We’re very happy with this creative formula we have with me and John producing the albums. In the old days, making albums with an outside producer, whether it be David Prater with Images And Words or Kevin Shirley with Falling Into Infinity, those were very, very difficult records for us to make. We would be constantly fighting and bickering and disagreeing, and at the end of the day, nobody knows or understands or gets our music better than us. It’s nice to have an objective outside ear, and that’s why we hire an engineer and a mixer to work with us. But at the end of the day, it’s important that we call our own shots.

JA: New bands you listen to.

MP: I listen to a lot of different things ranging from really heavy stuff like Opeth and Lamb of God to stuff that’s pretty commercial like Coldplay. I’m not a fan of commercial hard rock or pop metal. That’s one genre I’m not really crazy about. But I listen to a lot of different things. You may hear a band like Pantera saying that they go home and listen to the Beatles or Pink Floyd or whatever, but you don’t hear it in their music. There’s a lot of bands that may say they listen to a lot of things, but you don’t hear it come through. With us, we let it all come through. It doesn’t matter if it’s mellow or if it’s complicated or if it’s heavy or if it’s simple. We welcome all of the influences and we put it into the big giant melting pot and I think that’s how you get a lot of different sides of the band.

JA: As a big influence, what do you expect about Metallica’s new release?

MP: To be honest, I don’t really listen to Metallica that much anymore. My influence of theirs is Kill Em All to ...And Justice For All. Back in the early-to-mid-to-late ‘80s, that’s when I listened to Metallica. Now I’ll listen to them and check them out to see what they’re doing, but it’s not like it really has an impact on me musically. I like the old stuff. What do I expect from the new album? I have no idea, but I think that their last album was a step in the right direction. I think the production wasn’t so good and maybe the vocal melodies weren’t so good, but I did appreciate the fact that they were experimenting with longer songs and heavier songs. So I hope that they would continue more in that direction.

JA: Plans after Chaos In Motion European leg.

MP: This European tour has been awesome and we have one week left before we go home for the holidays, so we’re looking forward to that. Then we pick back up in January when we go to Asia and Australia, and then [in] March we’ll be doing the South American tour and then April and May we have another American tour and then we’ll finish and take a break for the next summer and then start a new record after that.