Originally published in Billboard magazine · June 2009
Sunny Forecast
By Christa Titus
Article2 min read
Dream Theater Appreciates The Upside On Black Clouds & Silver Linings
At the dawn of its major-label career in January 1993, the prog-rock act Dream Theater cracked radio with its debut single ‘Pull Me Under,’ which peaked at No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock chart. But even though programmers have probably long since forgotten the band’s name, the group retains a strong core fan base and is courting them in advance of its new album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings.
The album is due June 23 on Roadrunner. The label says it hopes to match or beat the numbers for Dream Theater’s 2007 album, Systematic Chaos, which entered the Billboard 200 at No. 19 with first-week sales of 36,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and went on to sell 136,000 copies.
Touring remains a top priority and the band has even established its own festival, Progressive Nation. Now in its second go-round, this summer’s lineup includes Zappa Plays Zappa, Pain of Salvation and Beardfish. The show will launch July 24 in Miami, after the band play a series of European festivals.
Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy explains that Progressive Nation was created for fans who don’t quite fit in “with the Lollapaloozas and the Ozzfests and the Coachellas and the stuff that’s out there in the summertime in America. There’s really no outlets for bands that are doing more progressive, musician-oriented music.”
Roadrunner is conducting an online promotion that offers a new cover song that Dream Theater will record each week until the album arrives. So far the label has released the band’s takes on Rainbow’s ‘Stargazer’ and a three-song Queen medley. The label also presented the track ‘Rite of Passage’ on Roadrunner.com as a video and a free 24 -hour MP3 download. Product manager Suzi Akyuz calls the response to the video “overwhelming,” saying, “We actually saw the most traffic for the Web site in Roadrunner.com’s history,” registering more than 100,000 unique users.
The band also feeds its fans’ appetite by supplying them with additional product, like official bootlegs, recordings from side projects and DVDs. Black Clouds satisfies that desire with four configurations: a standard CD, a double-vinyl LP set, a three-disc special edition and a limited-edition deluxe collector’s boxed set. The special and deluxe items include instrumental mixes of the album and the six cover songs. The deluxe set ups the ante with ritzy packaging, a mouse pad, a disc of the album’s isolated audio mixes, a numbered lithograph by artist Hugh Syme and a special giveaway: 100 of the lithographs are autographed by Syme, and a silver ticket that wins the buyer a Dream Theater meet-and-greet is enclosed in another 100 boxed sets.
“I spend a tremendous amount of time overseeing that stuff and making sure the fans are well fed,” Portnoy says. “But that’s mainly because I’m only doing what I would want as a fan.”