High On A Hill

Bernard Law catches up with a Switzerland visiting Dream Theater and drummer Mike Portnoy

You never know where a copy of the esteemed CRS magazine Rock Society might end up. Read by the great and the good, and those in between, many people read it on the train, in bed, or sat quietly in a chair. Mike Portnoy assures me that he reads the magazine once a year. “When I go to Neal Morse’s house to do his annual album with him he always has your magazine in his bathroom, so when I go to the bathroom making those albums that is what I read!” he laughs. Erm, I don’t think we’d best go there!

Mike has broken away from doing a sound check with Dream Theater in Wettingen, Switzerland to chat. With the release of the band’s latest album Black Clouds and Silver Linings, Dream Theater has embarked on another of their series of long tours.

The European Summer Tour has been one of festivals and one off gigs. Mike is pleased with things too. “It’s going great. We’ve been out for maybe three weeks at this point, and the album just came out this week so we are finally up and running,” he says.

The phone line from Switzerland drifts away disconcertingly like Radio Luxembourg used to do from time to time, but Mike is very upbeat and full of enthusiasm as the sound drifts back in again.

“This month has been one of festivals at the weekends and one off warm up shows during the week. It’s been good; it has been a little bit of everything. At the Download Festival and the Sweden Rock Festival you may be playing to thirty, fifty, eighty thousand people, and then we’ve played some clubs on our own, like in Moscow and Tel Aviv, where we’ve never played before.”

Dream Theater’s tenth studio album is a powerful statement of progressive metal and has garnered lots of praise. Drummer Mike Portnoy and guitarist John Petrucci once again undertook the producing duties, with Paul Northfield mixing. Some believe it to be the bands most balanced album in a decade, whilst others think it to be something of a definitive Dream Theater album. It has charted in some countries too. The band must be pleased with it then. “We must be pleased with it, or we’d still be making it.”

Mike chuckles. “Maybe some people who don’t get to produce their own albums could possibly not be happy with it, but we’ve been self-producing for the last six albums so we don’t give up until we’re done with it.”

Coming together to create an album is, for Dream Theater at least, very much a collaborative effort. No one begins the process with previous song writing efforts or scenarios. “When we go in we start writing and recording as the same process. We do it from scratch. We don’t come in and have like a dozen songs and then choose from them. We write the album in the studio and at the seventy-five minute mark if we are pleased with what we have then we move into the overdubbing process. All the instrumentalists move into a studio and we start playing. There are no existing songs or existing ideas. There might be a riff or a progression here or there, but the songs are developed collaboratively. It spawns and sparks ideas and further progressions, then come the rhythms the melodies, and then we have created some songs,” explained Mike.

Collectively writing the words for the songs would be an impossible task, and for Dream Theater the lyrics are always an individual process. (Mike is noted for writing songs extremely close to his heart). On this album The Shattered Fortress is another in a series of songs about his battle with alcoholism, whilst The Best Of Times is about his father who sadly passed away with cancer during the process of creating the album).

“Once the music is finished one of us will come up with the lyrics to it. It comes fairly easy. We’re professionals and we know what we are doing,” Mike says.

“For me personally though the hardest thing is the subject matter. Once I have the lyrics the melodies are easy. In the case of this album the subject and the lyrics were kind of already there and waiting for me. I knew what I wanted to write about. It was more opening up my soul and pouring my heart out. My lyrics are very very personal. I’ve only ever written personal lyrics. I’m more open and given to more personal feelings. I’ve always written things straight out of my life. I’ve never been a fantasy or fictional writer.”

Having such a rich back catalogue now, and creating extended songs, you may think that Dream Theater might struggle to decide what to play live. Many bands play the hits, fans favourites, or indeed the band’s favourites, but for Dream Theater the process is a little more scientific than that. “ I’ve always been the one that writes the set list and I run a very different set list for every single show,” Mike explains. “We’ll have may be fifty or sixty songs prepared for the tour and I’ll pull from that pool for the show. I do a tremendous amount of research for every show. Tonight here we are in Switzerland, and before getting here I looked what was played the last two or three times in Switzerland and so for tonight’s set we have a set list that is completely different from the previous times we were here. So the fans who come and see us on each and every tour get a different experience every time. There are no songs that get any more airtime than anything else. It is not like we have to play Pull Me Under or Metropolis. I don’t really favour any album or particular song. Everything has an airing at one point or another.”

All that might seem rather simple really, but it is a meticulous process. First of all the band members have to be ready and prepared to play just about any song from the bands history, more if they’re playing some cover versions. Anyone who has seen the band will know that they also employ some quite complex lighting systems, and so all of that has to be pre-configured too.

Besides the standard version CD of the album, Black Clouds and Silver Linings is also available as a three disc Special edition, comprising of the album itself, a CD of instrumental mixes of the album, and a CD of six cover songs.

If you really want to push the boat out though there’s an extra special deluxe box set planned. It will be a black velvet box with a silver lining and will comprise of the three CDs plus a DVD in mini jackets each with its own artwork. The DVD is actually of stem mixes of the album, a process that allows the listener to create their own mixes of the songs, so you can play any instrument extra loud or really low. Then you might be able to work out how to play the songs yourself! There’s a two-vinyl album picture disc version of the standard album included too, a lithograph of the cover art, and a jolly mouse mat. “Dream Theater has always done covers live, “ Mike explains.

“Through the years we have done lots of one off covers from the likes of Rush, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, and we’ve covered complete classic albums. We’ve done Dark Side Of The Moon, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, a Maiden album, a Metallica album, so doing covers for Dream Theater is nothing new. But doing them in the studio is new; this is the first time we’ve done them in the studio. I’ve personally been doing covers with other bands like Transatlantic though. For this album I basically submitted a list of songs I thought would be really diverse. In the past the choices have been more obvious, bands like Rush or Pink Floyd. Choosing the ones for this album I went a little bit more obscure, using bands like the Dixie Dregs, King Crimson and Zebra, and Queen and Rainbow. They themselves rarely played the songs we covered by Queen. It was fun to do, and we were able to get a little beef into some of these choices. For the prog aficionados that read your magazine these bands will be known, but the fifteen-year old kids who listen to Metallica and us might not know who King Crimson are. Hopefully we can introduce a new generation to the stuff we grew up with.”

Dream Theater is touring extensively this year. They will already have played a host of dates before you read this, but later in the year they will return with their Progressive Nation tour. It is a concept that Mike came up with a couple of years ago.

“I’ve always felt a kind of responsibility to share our audience with younger progressive bands,” he says. “Through the years I’ve always hand-picked bands like Spock’s Beard, Pain Of Salvation, Porcupine Tree, or Symphony X to support us on tour. These are all bands that on their own may only have played to a couple of hundred people a night at that time, and Dream Theater get to play to thousands of people a night and I’ve always thought that our success can in some way help out some of the up and coming bands that don’t necessarily have that audience. So through the years we’ve done that, and now Progressive Nation is hopefully taking that to a whole new level with a four-band package. Progressive rock just isn’t Gentle Giant and Genesis anymore. It has a range that comes from Opeth to Porcupine Tree and everything in between. Progressive Nation is kind of giving more opportunity for more progressive musicians by providing a platform to play on. Dream Theater has been very fortunate in the last fifteen or twenty years going to the level of mainstream success that we have that very few progressive rock bands manage to have. I realise how big the prog scene still is. I love it. I follow it. I love Flower Kings and Beardfish. These are bands that I follow and admire. I’m here to hopefully share some of our success with them in any way that I can.”

Modern prog rock fans will be pleased to know that Mike has once again collaborated with Neal Morse, Roine Stolt and Pete Trewavas with the band Transatlantic. They released two acclaimed studio albums and some live material but have been on ice for a while now. Each of the members has been very busy with their other bands of course. “We reunited after an eight-year hiatus and I’m as happy as anybody else that we finally did it because I think there was a magical chemistry between the four of us and I kind of missed being able to tap into it,” Mike says. “It was really great to get back together in April and we made a new album that I think will surpass everybody’s expectations which I am sure are pretty high to begin with. We really nailed it and I can’t wait for people to hear the album. It is pretty much all done, just a few tweaks and then the final mix.” You might call Mike Portnoy a busy musician then. Besides working with Dream Theater and Transatlantic he regularly contributes to Neal Morse’s albums, and has played with Liquid Tension Experiment, OSI, and others too. Not to mention drum clinics and one off projects. “Well, thank God! I’ve learned to strike while the iron is hot and the iron has been hot now for about fifteen years solid for me! I keep myself very busy. Dream Theater itself is an incredibly busy world, between the touring and the recording,” Mike says with a laugh. Not unsurprisingly, he has won something like twenty-three awards from Modern Drummer magazine, and is the second youngest inductee to the Rock Drummer Hall Of Fame. Rush’s Neil Peart beat him, by age at least.

Dream Theater will be back in the United States now through to August. They’ll be back over this side of the Atlantic in September and October for the Progressive Nation 2009 Tour with guests Opeth, Big Elf, and Unexpect. There are UK dates at Manchester, London and Glasgow. Check out the band’s website for more details.