Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

On whether he’s had any particularly bad experiences during his career that he hopes to never repeat:

Portnoy: “Well, strangely enough, one of Dream Theater’s most successful and popular albums, ‘Images And Words’, which I am extremely proud of, it was an incredible difficult to make. So, actually, as much as I look back at that album and the tour and the explosion that happened as a result of it – I mean, I look back at all that with great, great memories – the making of the record was very, very difficult, because it was our first record with a major label and they made us work with a producer, who made a great-sounding record, but was very, very hard and difficult to work with; he wasn’t really a ‘people person.’ So the making of that record was very painful and difficult from a personal point of view. So, yeah, even though I love everything in the catalog and I’m proud of it all, some of them were [more] painful or harder to make than others, but the end result is something that I’ve always been proud of.”

On the commercial success of “Images And Words”:

Portnoy: “That is pretty amazing that we were able to get away with what we were doing, especially in 1991, and that was the height of the whole Nirvana explosion. I don’t know… On paper, you would think that would have been a recipe for the biggest disaster, but maybe that’s why that album did well – because we kind of stuck out like a sore thumb at the time.”