John Petrucci interview (excerpt)

Asked about the shorter, more compact nature of some of the songs that appear on Dream Theater’s latest, self-titled album, Petrucci said: “Actually, the funny thing is, this album, it kind of has everything, if you look at it, because that was one of the conversations we did have. It’s something we did on the ‘Awake’ album, too, if you go back. The basic mentality is that every song doesn’t have to be 12 minutes long. It’s actually hard to do. The challenge is to try to write and keep the style that we write in without straying from the thing that makes us unique. And to try to do that within a four- or five- or six-minute mark, it’s hard to do. But we did that on a few songs and kept the energy up and everything. And we also made sure that we did include a big epic piece on there. We made sure that there was an instrumental on there, which is something that we wanted to do. But, yeah, as far as those few songs that are kind of on the shorter side, we did say, it would be a nice challenge to try to keep things short. And it’s really hard.”