Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

With all the bands you’ve been playing with in the recent years, it sounds like you’re trying to express all the aspect of your musical personality that Dream Theater actually concentrated before in one place. So aren’t you actually missing playing and creating music in that kind of band? Have you thought about founding a new prog metal band where you’d be able to pursue what you had in Dream Theater?

I think I pursue everything I was doing in Dream Theater with everything else I’m doing. But I’m able to do it with lots of different people. With Dream Theater it was just the same four people over and over and over and over, and I could only develop so far playing the same songs over and over with the same people. To me, it’s about exploring with different people and different mind, and collaborating with personalities and different voices. And I can expand further with all these different styles. I didn’t want to be defined by Dream Theater; I want to be defined by all of these things that I do in my career. I don’t want to live in the shadow of only one band. I want to be able to be a personality with its own voice, with a broad – a very, very broad – spectrum of colors, styles, albums and bands. That’s who Mike Portnoy is. What I did in Dream Theater for 25 years shows you one side of Mike Portnoy, but I always knew that there was way, way more bubbling underneath the surface that needed to get out and be explored and still does! And, to me, that has been musically satisfying. What I’ve done over the last four years, I never would have been able to do if I stayed in one band. I’ve now made over a dozen albums, with a dozen of different bands and toured with a dozen of different bands, played with everybody from Stone Sour to Fates Warning to Avenged Sevenfold to Big Elf to Winery Dogs to Transatlantic to Flying Colors… You ask me if I miss the style of what I did in Dream Theater, you know, I put together PSMS (Portnoy, Sheehan, MacAlpine and Sherinian) with whom I got to do a little bit of that style. But, you know, I don’t miss doing that one style. If I did, I would have stayed there. I needed to get out and explore lots of things.

All those bands, like Transatlantic, Flying Colors, The Winery Dogs or even Adrenaline Mob, didn’t really feature any “leaders”. Was that on purpose from your part? Has it been important for you to shy away from this status of being a leader?

Well, I think I was the leader in Dream Theater because I was always the most outspoken, I always had the strongest vision and I always had that extroverted personality. So I think that I was the leader by default! Because I always had the strongest personality in that band. But now, since then, I’ve worked with bands with other very strong personalities. You know, working with The Winery Dogs, with Billy Sheehan and Richie Kotzen, those guys have strong opinions and they have a lot of history as well, so you need to respect that and work with it. The same goes for Flying Colors, you know, working with Steve Morse and Neal Morse, you gotta learn to collaborate. With anything that I’ve done post Dream Theater I haven’t been the leader because they’ve been more collaborative situations with the personalities involved. To be honest I miss being the leader because it’s much easier functioning that way! In Dream Theater I made a million decisions and I just did them on my own. I didn’t have to send a million emails for every idea. You know, with Transatlantic, Flying Colors and The Winery Dogs, for every idea there’s a hundred emails that go back and forth [laughs] to come up with a definitive agreeable decision. It’s frustrating! It’s absolutely frustrating working that way. And I do miss the simplicity of running the show myself. But with running the show yourself also comes a tremendous amount of pressure, and there a tremendous amount of weight involved with that. So, you know, I think that during these four years, in every one of these bands I kind of had to play different roles. Every time you start working with other people, you have to kind of feel out the situation. Sometimes maybe somebody doesn’t want to be involved in one area so then you pick up the slack and you run with it and make the decisions. And then there’s other times when you have somebody who feels very passionate about a certain area and you’ve got to let them have they say, learn to compromise and be a team player. I think I’ve been very good at being a team player. I think a lot of people see me as this control freak because that was the role I had in Dream Theater but that was by default. But I can be a very good team player as well. If you look at any band I’m doing now, I’m very much a team player. I’m also very comfortable being a hired gun, you know! With Avenged Sevenfold, with Big Elf, with Neal Morse’s solo band, I just come and play drums, and I’m more than happy to play that role if that’s what’s required.

And by the way, as a leader you were the one that put in place and was in charge of the releases through Ytsejam Records. Aren’t you a bit disappointed that it’s not really maintained anymore?

Yeah! It’s unfortunate but I was always the man with the archives, I’m the one that has the entire archives from 1985 to 2010. So, unfortunately, when I left the band, with that went the archives. I’m not allowed to release anything from it. So there you go, it’s out of my control. It’s sad, it’s a waste but it’s the way things went.

You said a few months ago that you wanted to work on an autobiography. Do you have any news about that?

No. I get asked about it so often and I keep getting offers to do it but I’m… I don’t know. I keep shying away… I’m a very open and honest person. I like to answer every question I’m asked honestly and openly, but unfortunately, in this day and age of the internet, I found that, that kind of frank and candid conversations sometimes causes repercussions, with things being taken out of context or being misunderstood. So it’s easy for me to be a little gun-shy now and not be able to speak as honestly and openly as I wish I could. So the idea of doing an biography kind of scares me in that sense [laughs].

Is this why you seem to always be very up with what’s on Blabbermouth about you, because you’re sometimes maybe afraid of what is generally written about you or about what you say?

I care! I’m one of those musicians that really do care and I really pay attention to what’s been said online. And I’ve been like that from day one. Even before the internet, I was always the one that answered the fans’ mails, stayed in touch with the fans and paid attention to that sort of things. So inevitably with the invention of social media, Facebook, Twitter and things like that, I stay very involved and very open with my fan base. It has its good point and it has its bad points. It’s good because it puts me in direct touch and I really cherish that open relationship, and I know a lot of fans appreciate it as well. But it also kind of puts me in the spotlight and makes me the source of a lot of controversy as well as a result, because of that open relationship.

But are you actually afraid of that? Of how people might interpret your words?

I won’t say I’m afraid, I just say that I care. So when I see negative things being posted or things that are just plain wrong, you know, false information, inevitably I try to correct it or at least speak my side of the story. It’s not that I’m afraid of it, it’s frustrating. But I pay attention to it because I care. There are musicians out there that just don’t give a shit and don’t pay attention to it. I wish I could just turn it off and not care but the reality is that I do! I’ve always cared about what the fans said and I pay attention to that. And I think that’s what has always made me a fan friendly artist. But with that comes both sides of the coin.