Beginnings Middles Ends

Location: Southampton Guildhall, Southampton, UK

I asked Mike way back in March if he would be up for an interview for vUK when DT hit Southampton – nothing much about drums this time around, more about the kind of things that he does behind the scenes before, during and after a new album project. As always, Mike gave full answers! Enjoy the interview...

Al Muirden: At the end of the tour and pre- (what has become) the DT Summer break, is the date to re-convene for the recording of the next album already decided?

Mike Portnoy: We kind of have a game plan, we usually know how much time off we are able to get away with. The last three albums we’ve followed the same schedule, so when it came time for this break and studio time (for BC&SL) we kind of followed suit. We probably wouldn’t mind breaking the cycle at this point as it’s kind of becoming redundant to just be doing the same pattern. We can usually gauge when the tour has run its course and at that point, come up with an ending point for the tour and then “X” amount of time off, and then a starting point for the next album.

AM: Who decides on the venue for recording a new album and at what point is that set in stone?

MP: Usually those conversations are me and John (Petrucci) and the other guys just go with the flow... but we know that we always want to work in NYC if possible because it’s the most centrally based for all of us – me and John Myung are in Pennsylvania, John Petrucci and Jordan are in New York, and James is in Canada, so NYC is really the BEST place and we’ve done the last three albums there. But we knew after Chaos that we wanted to work with Paul (Northfield) again and that we wanted to work at Avatar (Studios) again – it was a good chemistry and a good location.

AM: Presumably when you guys come to NYC, you stay in hotels?

MP: Yeah – hotels Monday to Friday and then go home to our families for the weekends. Usually we’ll come in on Monday afternoon then go home Friday evening. The only ones that are there for the entire time are me and John Petrucci – we’re there every day for like 6 months! The other guys come and go as needed.

AM: I guess Paul Northfield also stays in a hotel in NYC?

MP: Yes – Paul was there every day like me and John and also our assistant engineer Rick Kwan, so really the four of us were the only “constants”, and yes, Paul stays in hotels and he doesn’t go home weekends as he lives in Montreal, so he actually would stay in NYC seven days a week. Throughout the course of the 6 months, he went home maybe two or three times.

AM: When you arrive to record, do you really arrive with no great ideas on how the album will take shape? The only recent exception being Octavarium when you had a particular concept?

MP: Yeah – there might be something here or there that somebody thought up, but really we don’t come in with any pre-determined material to work on.

AM: I know on Scenes from a Memory Jordan came in with a LOT of ideas and keyboard parts/sounds, etc.

MP: Right – and we also had the existing Metropolis Pt. 2 stuff from the FII sessions – but yeah, on that album we kind of had stuff that we came in with. Also on Six Degrees Jordan accumulated some ideas, but I think Jordan stopped bringing in accumulative ideas... not that he doesn’t have them, but I think those ideas come out more now, when we start to play...

AM: How much discussion is there between the band once the gear is set up about direction before you actually start to play?

MP: It depends on the album... like Train of Thought we had a direction, Octavarium – I had a concept; but Chaos and Black Clouds there was no discussion; we kind of just got on our instruments and let the music do the talking... and usually once we start writing and get the first song or two they are usually free of any pre-determined direction or restrictions. They just come out and once we have those under our belts, then we’ll look at that and then say OK, what do we need to balance... and at that point, we’ll have a view of the bigger picture.

AM: Could you talk us through a typical day when you’re writing for a new album?

MP: The writing has me, John, John and Jordan all there and the recording is me, John (Petrucci), and whoever is tracking. On the writing days, we usually stroll in around 2:00pm and then we’ll all order lunch! We have a menu book of about a hundred pages and we’ll just order whatever we want and eat until about 3pm or so and then after ordering more Starbucks (!) we’ll go play for an hour and then we’ll start thinking about dinner then. It all revolves around the eating actually! But we usually eat until about 3 or 4pm then play ‘til about 10 or 11 or midnight and at that point you start getting fried.

AM: Once you have the basic song structure in place, who is it that sorts out the click-track for final recording – is that still Jordan?

MP: Well actually in the past, it was a huge process that Jordan would usually have to do and John (Petrucci) would oversee that as well, but I don’t have the patience to do that, so on the previous albums, Jordan would map out a click-track and for some songs it would take an entire day or maybe two days to map out a click-track. This album was the first time we did it differently and we used an unbelievably useful tool – we used some software which I believe is called “Liquid Audio” and basically, it’s an amazing tool whereby we would write a song and record a demo – a live rehearsal version of it and then the click-track would be made to that demo. It actually takes the music and it makes a click-track to it, with all the change of tempos and this way, it’s not like we have to be regimented because it makes a click to what we actually write and feel, and then we do our tracking to that click-track. The magical thing about this program is that if something feels a little fast or slow, we can adjust that click accordingly – and there were moments where I liked say a drum fill from that live rehearsal demo and because of the click-track being so synced, we were able to keep those parts and use it on the album... it was really. really helpful.

AM: I guess that also minimizes the downtime for everyone else in the time saving?

MP: Well, Paul and Rick (Kwan) would still have to spend a little time mapping out the Liquid Audio, but it was a much, much quicker process.

AM: The (wall mounted) calendars that you create for the whole recording session (these have been seen on some of the behind the scenes footage for previous albums) – are these pre-prepared by you at home?

MP: Yes and we all have to allow for days here and there where maybe somebody has a family trip planned or someone has a clinic or whatever; so we just put them on the calendar and work around them. I still have the calendars from every album session and I’m so anal about it! It all has to be colour coordinated – the weekends have to be one colour and the days off have to be another colour! We’re probably the most organised band or team that you’ll ever see!

AM: And the white-board where you have the checklist of recorded parts so that you can tick off each instrument or vocal as it is recorded – is that a generic list or is it tailored for each session? I’m thinking if there was a Chapman Stick part or something else more “unique”?

MP: Well that would fall under the category of bass, so it tends to be fairly generic...

AM: Drum-wise on this album, you had two kits set up in the studio (a double bass drum Tama set of Bubinga wood drums and a single bass drum kit of Birch/Bubinga wood) – what was the thinking behind that?

MP: Well I knew I didn’t want to record with the acrylic drums. I wanted wood drums in the studio and I wasn’t sure which I wanted of the two wood choices, so basically I had Tama send me one of each and I set ‘em both up and just tested them out, and then ended up making a double bass set out of the Bubinga and a single bass set from the Birch/Bubinga.

AM: I believe Eric (Disrude) wasn’t there to set the kits up this time?

MP: Yes, he was already out on the road with Carrie Underwood, so he found someone to bring in the drums and set ‘em up.

AM: When you come to write the tunes for the album, is each song written and recorded more than just the drums only, before you move on to the next?

MP: What we do is we’ll write a song and once we’re happy with the music, we’ll get the click-track set up and then I’ll jump in and do drums, then John will do guitars, then John Myung will do bass. So those are the basics and THEN we’ll move on to the next song. So we save the keyboards and the vocals for the end – so it’s write, drums, guitar, bass in a cycle, then once we have all the album, then it’s like OK, we’ll do all the keyboards in one sitting, then we’ll do all the vocals.

AM: As each tune is finished, is there a conscious effort to get a balance of songs?

MP: Well, like I said earlier, once we let the first couple songs just spill out, then we’ll start looking at what’s missing – do we need a short song, do we need a lighter or heavier song – and that’s when we start considering the balance for the album.

AM: The vocal melodies are crucial to each song (unless it’s an instrumental of course!) – it seems like it must be a tricky thing to work out how and where the vocals will fit within the music – how aware have you got to be about how long each section is to allow for a good balance of vocal and music?

MP: Well, when we write the music, we’re conscious of where the vocals are going to go and the length and sometimes even the phrasing of them, so that’s completely thought about when the music is written and once the song is done that’s when we’ll divvy up the lyrics and in the case of this album, it was just me and John, you know. John wrote his melodies and I wrote mine and we each sang demos of each song we wrote the lyrics for – I did my two and John did his four with the lyrics and melodies and then we sent those to James to get comfortable with.

AM: How much was James around during the recording of BC&SL?

MP: Out of the entire writing process, he was there for one week with us... and then he came for two weeks to do his vocal tracks once we’d finished writing... out of 6 months, he was there 3 weeks.

AM: Is it quite a daunting prospect when you have 75 minutes’ worth of music and you have to come up with suitable lyrics for each tune?

MP: I think John enjoys it more than I do. In fact I’ve been saying this for years, but now with the “12 Step Suite” behind me, I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t my swan-song lyrically – I would be very happy not writing lyrics any more... it’s not one of my more passionate hats that I wear: So for me, I knew I had two things to write about, I had to finish up my “12 Step” thing and then I had the song I wanted to write for my Dad. For me the hardest thing is always the subject matter, but in this case with these two, the subject matter was there for me. Once I have subject matter, I find writing lyrics easy. I think John enjoys the process a lot – I think he would be very happy to write ALL the lyrics so if I’m actually going to stick by my plan of retiring from lyric writing, then I think he would be very happy to pick up the slack!

AM: Do you tend to do it in one session or do you leave it and come back to it?

MP: I leave it and come back to it. Just as I’m like riding down the road or whatever, things will come to me and I’ll just punch it into my Blackberry and accumulate notes and then sit down and put those notes together. In the case of ‘The Shattered Fortress’ I had notes for years – I knew when I was writing ‘This Dying Soul’ and ‘Root of all Evil’ I was coming up with words or phrases that I knew I wanted to include in 10, 11 and 12 so that was an accumulation of thoughts and ideas.

AM: Once you have the lyrics and James has had the lyrics and melodies, do you sit down with him and talk through them?

MP: Yeah – we’ll not talk about the melodies so much ‘cos they kind of are what they are... with his singing abilities and his range, he’s able to bring them to life better than me and John can on our demos, but for the most part the melodies are kind of set in stone. The one thing that James always wants to talk about is what the lyrics are about: the content, the emotion – the kind of “character” he’s trying to sing with.

AM: When the album is complete is it you and John that would decide on the sequencing of the songs?

MP: That’s me actually – John doesn’t care about that... well maybe he does, but he knows that I really get very into that so it’s kind of always been my job.

AM: Once you, John and whoever mixes an album, I guess the other guys are hearing it for the first time once it’s mastered and ready to go?

MP: Yeah – well if we need to change things... there have been times if we need to change a bass note or a vocal thing or a keyboard thing, through the magic of Pro-Tools, it’s very easy to grab a B♭ from this part and just plug it in, but yes, basically the guys play their parts and then they trust me, John and Paul to mix and master.

AM: The cover songs idea for BC&SL – when did that manifest itself?

MP: At the very, very start of the album, I knew that I wanted to do a covers disc for a special edition and the label are very supportive of special editions – I didn’t want to repeat the formula of the “Making of...” DVD and the 5.1 that we did last time, so I had in the back of my mind the covers disc and an instrumental version – I kind of knew that all along... and then at the very beginning, I emailed the guys a list of covers that I wanted to do. They didn’t question it and are all very cool with going with whatever I do – whatever I say, they trust my direction.

AM: The production on this album seems super-clear. Was that deliberate – as a drummer even on a song like ‘A Rite of Passage ‘ (the only final version track I’d heard at this point) you can clearly hear the hi-hat in the left channel, when you CLOSE it?

MP: It’s strange because my hi-hat patterns when I’m playing a groove are very irregular too – most people would play like straight up-beats but my left foot is just floating around!

AM: Well, it’s more that you’re setting yourself up on the second bass drum for the next fill in many cases!

MP: Right! I will say that in terms of the album sound, I gotta give John Petrucci a LOT of credit when it comes to our partnership. We really balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I’m incredibly anal about the details; what’s recorded, when it’s recorded, how it’s recorded but I’m NOT very anal about the sounds and the EQs, whereas he is and he doesn’t really care about some of the details that I always oversee, but he’s really good with the sounds and he might re-record his guitars four times until he’s totally happy with them. So I think that’s really his strength in our partnership. I jokingly call you “Eagle Eye” and I call him “Anal Ears” – old “Anal Ears Petrucci!” That’s really a strong quality of his role in the production team.

AM: Stylistically with this album it looks to have some more stunning artwork – presumably you’re thinking about ideas as the album is being written and recorded or does that all come at a later date?

MP: I’ll usually get in touch with Hugh (Syme) once the lyrics are done, towards the vocal process – once there’s lyrics I can send him and an album title – sometimes the title is ready at that point, sometimes not – that’s the stage when he and I start working on the layout and this album and the last, I kind of let him do his thing and then I tweaked and worked with him, whereas with Octavarium I had a very definitive direction with everything – with Chaos and Black Clouds I kind of just gave him the lyrics and the title and see what he came up with and then it was a lot of tweaking from there.

AM: Do you have a face to face meeting with him?

MP: No – believe it or not, I’ve never met him! We’ve done five albums together and he and I are in constant email and telephone calls, pretty much every day for the course of two or three weeks while we’re tweaking, but never face to face. He’ll have an idea and he’ll call me first thing in the morning or whatever and then I’ll get back to him quickly, so we work very closely together. It’s funny because for this album, the very first thing that Hugh gave me for this album cover is what’s on my bass drum heads now – which was just a simplistic black stroke with a silver surrounding... and in a way I thought it was very classy looking, it almost looked like a Rush cover or something, but it was SO minimalistic, it just didn’t feel like this album. So basically we probably went through about 8 or 9 drafts before we ended up with what it became, so what’s on my bass drums as the first draft to what it became is very, very different.

AM: Do you get frustrated with people that can’t keep up with you!?

MP: Well. we only work with people that we work well with. Paul Northfield really understands our process and our speed. Hugh Syme and I are very much on the same page. Even with the Chaos in Motion cover I was going to say to him that I pictured an ant carrying a globe and he came to me and said “I got this great idea of an ant carrying a globe!” and it’s like – “God Bless You!” – we are meant to work together! So we kind of have surrounded ourselves with people at this point, whether it be in the studio or on the road, that really understand our process and can hang with it.

AM: When you come to look at putting a new tour on the road, when do you make approaches to potential crew?

MP: Well usually when we book the studio time, it’s kind of open-ended. We’ll say we’ll start around October and hope to finish around February or March, but usually, we’ve gotta wait until the writing process is underway – once the songs are written and we’re in tracking mode, we can pretty much pin down a definitive delivery date which gives us a goal and once we have that, we can come up with a release date with the label and once we have that, we can determine a touring start date and at that point we need to start nailing down our crew. Really it’s once we’re in over-dubbing land – that’s when delivery, release and tour starts to get penciled in – at that point we start to see who we can and can’t get for our crew.

That’s the thing – for the year or so that we’re NOT on the road, our crew guys have to work with other bands and sometimes when we need them to move into the studio or do a one-off, they’re not always available. We’ve had consistency with Rikk (Feulner – Tour Manager) and I had Eric (Disrude) for 5 years and Jose (Baraquio) for 12 years before that, so there are guys you can hold on consistently, but also other guys have gotta pay their bills when we’re not on the road.

AM: When you come to the first tour rehearsals to play the newly written tunes you don’t really know how they’re going to sound in a live environment – that must be a great feeling!

MP: Yes – even when we play them as a band in the studio, they don’t have vocals, so usually the first time we hear them live with vocals is at rehearsals.

AM: It must be a REALLY exciting time...

MP: It’s a little scary! Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew when we’re tracking – especially John and Jordan with their leads and unisons – sometimes it’s very easy to come up with something like that in the studio and forget that you need to play it every night for the next year... or for the next 20 years for that matter! In my case with singing and playing at the same time... there’s a fill right before the second chorus in ‘A Rite of Passage’ that when I was just playing drums was no problem, but then when we started doing vocals and I’m SINGING on top of that I’m like “how the f**k am I going to sing and play this at the same time?!”

AM: The additional voices just before verse one of ‘A Rite of Passage’ work superbly live – I was wondering how you would perform those.

MP: Yeah – that’s Jordan sampling them – that’s something we wouldn’t have been able to reproduce live vocally... he has all of mine and John’s individual words that are going backwards and floating around and he just samples each one as we go.

AM: How many days rehearsal did you have before this leg?

MP: Four days – two instrumentally and then two with vocals... and at this point we only concentrated on what was being played in this June leg, so there’s a whole bunch of songs that we’re going to have another round of rehearsals with full production before “Progressive Nation” – that’ll be to dial-in the lights and the video and also learn most of the new album and whatever older songs are also added in.

AM: How do you approach the setlist to include songs from a new album?

MP: Well on this leg, we’re doing the exact same set tonight as we did last night because we’re just starting to get in the groove and locking things in.

AM: How does it feel after all of the effort that goes in to a new album to read such positive reviews? I haven’t seen or heard a single bad review of BC&SL.

MP: Well, I wish I could say I don’t read or care about the reviews, but I do! I spend WAY too much time reading the message boards... the interesting thing about records NOW is that you can read what every single fan thinks because of the Internet. When we put out Images and Words and Awake – before the Internet, you could ONLY read what the journalists were thinking and then the only time you’d hear what a fan thinks is when they’d meet you and tell you. But now you can read what the fans REALLY think... maybe that’s not the best thing ‘cos sometimes it makes me crazy but...

AM: Do you feel PARTICULARLY good and positive about this album – it seems like it has a very strong undercurrent from the build-up?

MP: I feel good about ALL of our albums to be honest with you – we always really put a lot into every album we make and I can’t truly have an objective opinion of one of our albums until maybe a couple years down the road. I think it’s the same with the fans – I remember Octavarium came out and most of the fans loved it and then time went on and maybe some people would say they didn’t like it. Same with Chaos – everyone loved it (at the time) but you get the true feelings now – they’re a little braver and saying what they really think... I think it’s the same for everybody – you really need time to see where the music is going to sit in your catalogue.

AM: Finally a couple of odd questions! The 8” snare that some of us might have seen being delivered to the studio – who ended up constructing it and was it used?

MP: It never even got put together! I didn’t use it and it’s sitting in my garage! I had an idea of using it and it never got put together only because there was a problem finding a bottom hoop that would fit for the snares, so there was a technical reason that it never got put together.

Tama does make a 10” snare that I considered using, but I got the idea for an 8” from a Swedish drummer – Morgan Agren – he uses it and I saw some stuff he was doing and thought I’d love to use that, but it never got off the ground. That’s what happens when you don’t have a tech IN the studio! If I had had Eric or Jose there with me, it surely would have got dealt with and would have been put on the kit, but when Tama just sends ME something it just ends up sitting in the corner!

AM: Could you give us some tasters on the new Transatlantic album?!

MP: Epic, awesome! It’s met and even surpassed my expectations, which were very high. The chemistry was there – it was like we never went away. We had 10 days in Neal’s studio, it was a very similar process to Dream Theater, where we would write and arrange as we went, and we kind of made a live demo while we were arranging. We would arrange a part, then record it, then do another part, then record it all to have something to reflect on and listen to and finally create a click-track to that. Then I actually did my drum tracks to that... we basically did what Dream Theater do but condensed into 10 days!

AM: Thank you Mike as always, it’s been great speaking with you.

MP: Alright guys – we’ll be back in October – see ya then!

As ever, my thanks go to Mike (or giving us his time (we ended up with just over 40 minutes which I’m sure is WAY more than average for MP) – we feel privileged that he was so gracious and available! Big thanks also to my steadfast partner in crime, my bro’ in law Robbie, who was with me and did the videoing and generally helped me out. Additional thanks to Rikk Feulner for squaring the whole thing up and Kerry and all at vUK for getting this in print! Until next time...