A Dramatic Turn Of Events

DT keyboardist Jordan Rudess tells all to Phil Ashcroft

To the outside eye things had seemed pretty stable in the Dream Theater camp. Founder members John Petrucci (guitars), John Myung (bass) and Mike Portnoy (drums) had been mainstays since the mid-80s, whilst singer James LaBrie had joined in the early 90s and appeared on all but the debut album, and even the new guy, keyboard wizard Jordan Rudess, has been around for over a decade. Therefore it came as a huge shock to the band and its fans when undisputed band leader Portnoy announced his departure late in 2010. After a brief period of confusion the rest of the band decided to carry on without him and started to audition many of the world’s top rock drummers. Obviously surprised by this development, Mike Portnoy asked for some sort of reconciliation, stating that he’d only wanted some time off, but with personality issues obviously going deeper than anyone realised, the remaining members declined his offer and continued their audition process, selecting the wonderful Mike Mangini and entering the studio in the new year to record their new nine-track opus – the autobiographically titled A Dramatic Turn Of Events.

All my previous Dream Theater interviews have been with either Mike Portnoy or singer James LaBrie, so I was particularly looking forward to speaking with Jordan Rudess for a different view. So the first big surprise as I waited in the press area at London’s High Voltage festival was that the whole band turned up to do five separate interviews simultaneously, even the usually reticent John Myung and new drummer Mike Mangini are on press duty. I shook Jordan’s hand as we were introduced and expressed my surprise about this unexpected situation, to which the keyboard player quipped with a grin, “Yes, these days even the unheard Dream Theater members get to be heard!”

With Portnoy having played such a huge role in every aspect of the band’s career it was perhaps inevitable that everyone in the band would have to change their roles slightly to take up the slack.

“Yeah, in a way there’s been a kind of natural shift just to make up for the fact that we lost a member,” agrees Rudess, “and now we have a member that’s new and has different concerns and a different personality. At first it was a little bit ‘Oh my God! What are we going to do now?’, but then we started making lists of what needs to get done in this band. Mike Portnoy had so much to do with so many things that we really needed to step up to the plate and say, ‘OK, we’ve been a little bit complacent here, let’s figure out what needs to happen,’ which I think we’ve done quite successfully.”

As for making their first Portnoy-less album, Jordan reveals that the band had absolutely no doubts that they could pull it off.

“We went into it with a feeling of really wanting to focus, do our thing and be able to create the best music that we knew how to do, just to show people that Dream Theater can continue on in a positive, strong and musical way,” he explains. “Actually the least of our concerns was the music. If you look at the bigger picture then the guys in this band are all very capable musicians and writers, so going into this album was more about continuing on with the music as we’ve done before and showing people that everything is still cool in Dream Theater land.”

Despite me not having received the promo copy of A Dramatic Turn Of Events that was sent out earlier in the week, one listen to the full album just before the interview was enough to confirm that the one previously streamed song, ‘On The Backs Of Angels’, wasn’t a misrepresentation. The style is far more melodic than anything the band have done since 1997’s Falling Into Infinity, in fact with three mellow tracks and plenty of light and shade in the others, it’s probably the most melodic album they’ve made. They’ve obviously made a conscious effort to steer away from the harder metal that Portnoy was moving them towards, and go back to a similar direction to the one they first became known for.

“Oh, definitely!” states Rudess. “I think this album has a nice dose of metal but it’s not really the angrier side of metal. You probably noticed that we’d been experimenting with the growly vocals, but now we don’t have anyone in the band who’s into that, so we’ve gone back to more harmonic concepts. Whereas before John Petrucci would come up with a heavy riff and we’d kinda double it with a snarly sound, now I’m saying ‘Hang out there a minute, I have a left hand as well as a right hand, lets figure out some nice changes.’ So I get out my music paper and we take our time and really compose things.”

The album has keyboards sharing equal billing with the guitars, and the whole balance of the instruments is just right, something Rudess puts down in part to Andy Wallace’s mix, a man more well known for his work with heavier bands than Dream Theater.

“I think you can hear everything a little better because the drums are not as in your face,” says the keyboardist, “but yes, it’s something we talked a lot about and Andy Wallace has done a great job on the mix so you can hear every instrument really clearly.”

Although with three ballads and gentle parts in some of the other songs, maybe it’ll be a bridge too far for some?

“I don’t know, I think it’s a nice balance. Some people always find it in them to complain, but what can you do?” he shrugs.

Another area where work has been spread around since Portnoy’s departure is the songwriting.

“Well,” begins Rudess, “our new drummer Mike Mangini was not there at that point so he wasn’t involved, but the main writers are John Petrucci and myself, and John Myung was very involved in the process, he contributed freely and he came up with some great riffs, and James (LaBrie) was very particular about the vocal melodies and said what he did and didn’t like, and what he wanted to keep.” But are there any songs that definitely wouldn’t have happened if Mike Portnoy was still in the band? “Yes!” he says without hesitation. “As creative and talented as Mike obviously is, his opinion and his style of drumming would sometimes push us in a different direction, whereas this way we could write whatever we wanted and then later tell Mike Mangini how to play it. It worked out quite well for us because as composers it opened us up a little bit and gave us more freedom to do what we wanted. I liked that, I don’t want to be limited by other people’s desires or abilities.”

Portnoy had been heavily involved in the production side of things since 2000’s Scenes From A Memory, was this another hole they could successfully plug?

“You know what? That was one of the main questions I had, and I guess everybody else had, but what happened was that John Petrucci showed real strength as our producer and did a great job. I was a little worried going into it, but John’s a real confident, strong-minded guy and he came into it saying ‘I can produce this album!’ And he did a fantastic job, he brought out the best in everybody and just let everybody have their space. He totally guided it, and now the album’s complete I’ve told him numerous times how happy we all are with the job he did. It’s awesome, you can hear the keyboards and the bass, everything is balanced, and when you see us live I think you’ll notice how positive the vibe is in the band.”

As the band’s keyboard player, Jordan is obviously overjoyed at the clarity with which his instrument has been represented, not to mention the variety of different sounds he uses.

He smiles broadly as he explains, “You know what’s funny? Through the albums I’ve had thousands of sounds and I still ended up making some new ones, but even the sounds that I’ve used before can be better heard on this record. Someone said the other day ‘That choir sound you used is great’ and I said ‘It’s the same sound I used on Scenes From A Memory, you just couldn’t hear it before.’ There’s this phenomenon that happens if you’re not aware of how to make it not happen, and it’s that when you have so much sound, with huge guitar and huge drums, I could play the world’s greatest keyboard sound and it ends up sounding this thin,” he emphasises with his fingers. “What we managed to do, and what Andy managed to do, is consider that, and make sure that all the different sounds can be not only heard but also appreciated for what they are. I felt in the past that a lot of those sounds got lost, but now I’m really enjoying my role in this band and it’s great that you can hear all these things that you maybe couldn’t before – the choir, the strings – it’s basically the same stuff, it’s just been treated differently. I guess my progressive side really likes songs like ‘Outcry’, that have a lot going on, and the song ‘Breaking All Illusions’ has a great chorus. I’m just happy with the album as a whole, I think it’s really cool.”

Their label, Roadrunner, are noted for putting out different versions of albums, and A Dramatic Turn Of Events will have, amongst others, a Deluxe Collector’s Box Set.

“I was just hearing about that before,” says Jordan, “it sounds really neat and there are some really nice things in there. There’s the CD, there’s a double disc vinyl of the album, a really nice lithograph, and I also believe they’re also scattering some tickets for life in the boxes, which will get you into any Dream Theater show in the future, so that’s really cool. There’s a disc of instrumental versions of the album tracks also. I guess because it’s Dream Theater some people like to hear these things, mostly other musicians I suppose, but there are a lot of fans out there who seem to want that.”

One of the things that the guys have complained about in the past was Mike Portnoy insisting they rehearse far more songs than they really need so that he could change the set almost nightly.

“That’s something that we don’t want to do that much anymore,” says the obviously relieved keyboardist, “and right now we’re sticking to the songs we most want to play. I don’t know how we’re going to approach it in the future but I can pretty much promise that no-one is particularly into changing the set every night. What we really value and what everybody could never really do to a point where we were comfortable, was nailing down a show. We have sound people and lighting people and what they really need to do is time everything so that the show is really smooth, and it’s really important to all of us in this period of transition to say ‘You know what? We have the opportunity to really work out a show, so that when we move from one song to another it’ll be really smooth and professional!’ We think the fans will really enjoy it more that way.”

Does Jordan think that the set has suffered because of that before? He pauses before replying, “I think that the show has suffered. I think there are fans out there who value having a different set every night because they go to more than one show, but they’re relatively few, and I think sometimes our performance has suffered because of that approach. There’s a lot to be said for a show that’s dialled in – I mean we’re playing in different towns, so how many people are seeing it from night to night? Only a few I think, so why not just do the same set and work on it until it’s dialled in, so that’s what we’re doing and it’s really working so far, there’s a lot of good stuff. That’s not to say it’s not without its challenges, and nothing against what Portnoy did – he led this band for quite a number of years and did a good job – but we’re enjoying where we’re at now, the music is really happening, we’re running around the stage and we’re smiling, and it seems like the audience seems to be really elated.”

Going back to the songs that featured Mike’s harsher vocals, it seems that they won’t be considered for inclusion in the live set.

“At the moment we wouldn’t even want to,” laughs Rudess. “We might think about that at a later date but at the moment we have such a good repertoire, like tonight we have a really good selection of tunes that we all want to play and we all feel comfortable with. We made a list of all the songs that everyone most wanted to play and then we went through it, making sure we had something from this album and that album, and it worked out nicely – the set that we’ve been playing is really well paced and well balanced. We came off stage in Wolverhampton last night knowing that both us and the crowd were happy, so it’s going very well so far.”

Amongst Dream Theater fans the auditions for Portnoy’s replacement created huge interest, and with many great drummers applying it must surely have been a difficult choice?

“Well, it was pretty early on that we realised it would be between a couple of guys, but all the guys that we got to come down were pretty amazing drummers,” says Jordan. “As far as the job goes we’d pretty much narrowed it down to being between Marco Minnemann and Mike Mangini, so we had a couple of meetings and all sat down and watched the footage again and again, and all things considered, Mangini was the man.”

The band not only took their drumming chops into consideration, they were also judged on personality and attitude as they had to pick someone they felt comfortable with and who they thought the fans would accept to fill some pretty big shoes. “Definitely!” he states flatly. “I mean, Mike Mangini came into the audition – and you look back on something like this and it’s a real lesson in life – because he came in and said ‘I want this gig, I can do it, and basically everything I’ve done in my life has led me to this spot, it’s totally meant to be and I’m going to nail this!’ And he did! He just had the attitude of really, really wanting to be in this band and he played his ass off, he’s full on – there was no hesitation, he wanted it, he played, and we were very impressed.”

Whilst Mike Portnoy famously planned the band’s every move years in advance, the new democratic process isn’t going to be quite so meticulous.

“No, we’re not looking that far ahead,” smiles the amiable keyboard player. “Personally all I’m thinking is that we’ve got a whole new album that I have to go home and figure out how to play, and at the moment it’s just nice to be able to play a show and then get on the bus and chat about things. The long future plan was a very Mike Portnoy thing, so it’s just nice to just hang out together and talk about things. There’s a great positive energy in the band and we’re getting a lot done that way.”

After we shake hands, Jordan Rudess walks away to rejoin his bandmates who are all finishing their respective interviews at the same time, and together they walk back to their tour bus with smiles on their faces. It looks like the future of Dream Theater is in safe hands.