Charlie Dominici interview (excerpts)

Rock My Monkey: I’m doing great. Hey, it’s a Sunday, no stress, no worries. Now, what inspired you to start making music again after being out of it for so long?

Charlie Dominici: Well, I think probably a better question would be why was I out of it for so long? I was out of it because I got burned out. I mean, it was a long period of time that kind of cumulated with the Dream Theater experience, and the bad experience we all had with the record company and the label not being behind us, and all the promises that fell through. At that point I got very discouraged. Just tired of the business. I mean, it had been many years of ups and downs, and bands and this and that. I kind of was at the end of a long period of discouragement, and I just needed to get out for a while. I guess it turned into a longer while than I thought. Like anything else, if you really love something, if you’re away from it for long enough, you’re going to come back to it. That was what happened. I needed that time away to get that passion back, because I was starting to hate it. It was just one of those things. You do something for so long, you get a lot of-you start to lose the passion. And that’s what was happening. So being away from it for quite a while, of course, it being a natural thing for me to be doing, and not be doing what comes naturally, after a while it just kind of came full circle, and I started to pick up my guitar again, and I got that original feeling back when I was a kid, when I got into it. So it was actually a good thing.

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Rock My Monkey: The band that you’ve been playing with seem to be basically unknowns. Where did you find them, and how long have you guys been playing together?

Charlie Dominici: Not only are they basically unknown, but this whole story is probably completely inconceivable to them. I don’t think they even know, really. I mean, they understand the music, because music is the universal language, and they understand what it is, because we wrote the music together, most of the music together. But as far as the lyrical concept, and the concept of the trilogy, I think it’s going to be awhile before they really grasp it. But I think it’s that way for a lot of people. But the way I found them was actually through some internet ads that I had. I had been speaking with Mike Portnoy, when they play, when I’m in the neighborhood, or they’re in my neighborhood. And I was talking to Mike Portnoy backstage, and I was like, Mike, I’m trying to do this project, the first album was acoustic, and I don’t want to do that again. I really need a band. The stuff I’m writing now is really heavy. He said to me, why don’t you put an ad on the Italian Dreamers? There’s a lot of really good musicians through some of these Dream Theater cover bands. I didn’t want a Dream Theater cover band, but I figured, you know what, there’s a lot of good musicians there, maybe there’s a band-and it was almost like a premonition. Because what happened was a lot of these Dream Theater cover bands, or cover type, Dream Theater copy musicians, sent me cds. A lot of them were real good. Some of them weren’t. But they were all in different places, in different parts of Europe, in fact. It was just not feasible for me to put together guys from four corners of the world, and how expensive that would be, and who knows if they would even get along, let alone if it would work and gel as a band. But just as I was about to give up I got these discs and a video from this band called Solid Vision. They actually were playing together as a progressive band, an original band, not a Dream Theater cover band. I just knew as soon as I heard it. I just knew that they would be the kind of band that I could do this with, and especially since they were already a band. And when I flew there to work with them, on a whim, I went and spent a week with these guys, and never met them before. And stayed in these strangers’ house in a foreign land. That don’t even speak my language, and I don’t speak their’s. It was wild. We just clicked. And we just wrote the first couple songs. I had School of Pain from the album, the music of it, kind of written on acoustic guitar, and that’s why that whole song starts out that way, because I had written it on acoustic guitar. And we just jammed it together, and we worked together, and turned it into a more progressive metal thing. The whole album just mushroomed from there. We just wrote it all together. In fact, we wrote that whole album, we wrote all that music together in under thirty days.