Originally published in Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper · August 2009
Dream Theater Motto: No Sex, No Drugs, Just Rock ‘N’ Roll
By Darryl Sterdan
News2 min read
James LaBrie’s career give a Whole new meaning to the term Dream Job.
The 46-year-old Canadian singer has spent 18 years fronting the U.S. prog-metal outfit Dream Theater, recording critically acclaimed albums and touring the globe for worshipful fans. But if you think they live a cushy existence of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, dream on.
“All that backstage stuff – drinking and high-rolling and all that – is the very antithesis of this band,” claims LaBrie from Miami, hours before kicking off a world tour, which brings them to Canada this week and next with Zappa Plays Zappa, Scale The Summit and Bigelf.
Dream Theater play Friday at Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre, Sunday at Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre, next Tuesday at Calgary’s MacEwan Hall, and the following night at the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton.
“Sure, when I’m at home I love my red wine and beer. But when we’re on the road and we have fans coming out and paying good money to see the show, the least we can do is provide them with the best possible show. So we stay very focused and we work very hard.”
How hard? Well, how about this: Unlike other bands that play the same songs every night for a year, Dream Theater perform a different show every night – with setlists based not only on what they played last night, but what the 24-year-old band played every other time they visited that city.
“Our drummer Mike Portnoy has every setlist we have ever played,” LaBrie says. “On his computer, he can see every song we’ve played in every city on every tour. And he will do everything to make sure that we never play the same song in the same city two tours in a row.
“He’s OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), there’s no doubt about it,” the singer says, laughing. “And he’ll be the first one to admit it. But he’s not obnoxious about it. We know that a lot of our fans come to more than one show, so our mindset is to make it interesting not only for them but for us.”
LaBrie guesstimates that the band has about 80 songs in rotation – most of which are musically complex epics that can last up to 42 minutes. “And not to toot my own horn, but I still don’t use a TelePrompter.”
How does he keep it together? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall – practice, practice, practice.
Dream Theater’s new CD Black Clouds And Silver Linings, a concept album about momentous events in the bandmembers’ lives, is out now.