Mike Portnoy interview

Kerrang: We’re here in the Kerrang offices to talk a little bit about your upcoming new album, the tenth studio album from Dream Theater.

Mike Portnoy: The tenth studio album, that is correct.

K: Does it feel like a particularly important landmark in the career for the band?

MP: It doesn’t feel any different than our fourth or our seventh. I imagine our 13th will probably feel the same, but we’re getting older and the fans are getting younger, and we’re still here rocking it.

K: Do you think there’s a chance that in five years’ time we could be here talking about the making of the 20th?

MP: At the rate we work, it’ll take another 20 years to get to the 20th. We usually do 1 per 2 years.

K: Do you have another 10 in you do you think?

MP: Definitely, for sure.

K: All right. What can fans expect from the upcoming new album Black Clouds and Silver Linings?

MP: Well, like all Dream Theater songs – and this one maybe more so than usual – the songs are long. A lot of long songs, a lot of epics. If you just want to hear Green Day, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you’re willing to sit down and be taken on a journey through many twists and turns that will take you from Opeth-land all the way over to Pink Floyd-land, then you’ve found the right album – this is the album for you.

K: You mentioned you’ve notice that your fans are getting younger – what do you think it is about the sort of current musical climate that’s inviting more young fans into Dream Theater’s world?

MP: I think we make music that still sounds current. We’re not these progressive old farts like Yes or Rush or whatever. I mean, I love those guys, but they’re definitely a different generation. We come from this generation that grew up with Maiden and Metallica and all that kind of stuff. I mean, yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time, but I think our sound is current. You could take our album and stand it up next to the Trivium’s the Slipknot’s, and it sounds current like they do, but it’s got a little bit of that old-school mentality.

K: I read an interview somewhere that you think, or your band thinks it’s got more of a gothic vibe to it than past releases – is this true?

MP: I think one of the guys said that somewhere and it’s been haunting me ever since. I’m over here on this press tour and I hear this gothic comparison everywhere. I don’t know where the hell it came from.

K: Not true?

MP: I don’t think so. I mean there’s some moments on the album that have that dark tone. There’s definitely a darkness to some of the songs, but we’re not a goth band. It’s not us, sorry.

K: Not by album 20?

MP: Maybe! [laughs] Maybe if we were bitten and turned into vampires right now, we could stay this age but then really explore our gothic side, so who knows?

K: What are the band’s plans for the rest of 2009?

MP: We’re looking forward to playing Download. We’ll be doing festivals all through June and then we go back to America and we do our own package tour, which is a thing called Progressive Nation. And then we’re gonna do a European/UK version of Progressive Nation in the fall, so there’ll be a UK dates coming soon. We’re taking out one of my favorite metal bands on that, we’re gonna have Opeth with us and two other younger more up-and-coming bands, a band called Bigelf and a band called Unexpect, and looking forward to coming back and doing it.

K: I was just about to ask you as well in relation to that whether you think there are some really good upcoming bands working within the same genre – are there any other ones as well?

MP: Yeah. I love new music. I may be this 42 year old man, but I’m still a 13 year old kid at heart, and I’m always checking out new bands. I love everything from Mastodon to the Mars Volta to Bloodbath to Porcupine Tree, Lamb of God, whatever. If it’s good, I like it – it doesn’t matter. To me, there’s only two kinds of music: good music and bad music – the genres don’t matter.

K: What do you listen to yourself personally, like on your own MP3 player?

MP: My iPod – I have the 160 gig – and I still have to take stuff out to fit stuff in, it’s over-packed. You could flip through it and it’s got everything from the Bee Gees to Bloodbath, from Camel to Voivod, and everything in-between.

K: Eclectic music tastes therefore kind of working their way onto Dream Theater’s own albums as well?

MP: It’s always been that way. If you take the time to sit with any of our albums, you’ll hear that the influences and the styles just run the gamut, often within the context of a 15 minute song, but if you sit and take that journey you’re going to go through a lot of twists and turns.