Interview: Dream Theater’s John Petrucci Gives Update from the Studio

Sep 15, 2015

John Petrucci is in beautiful Budapest, Hungary on a glorious summer’s day when Revolver reaches him by phone. Dream Theater, his progressive metal band, is about to play one of the twenty-five European festival dates they have scheduled for the summer of 2015 – and yet, the Dream Theater guitarist and leader admits that he kind of wishes he was back in the studio, immersed in constructing the follow-up to the band’s self-titled 2013 opus.

“I’m happy to perform, and I love it,” says Petrucci. “At the same time, I’d rather focus on the creative process and working on the album. Switching gears to go on tour is something that’s a little bit difficult to do.”

Since January of this year, Dream Theater’s as-yet-untitled thirteenth album has been slowly taking shape at Long Island, New York’s Cove City Sound Studios, with Petrucci producing. “We did the last couple albums there,” the axman explains. “It’s a great spot for us. It’s not too far from where I live and it’s where the band originated. It’s like home away from home for us.”

Though Petrucci says “it’s really too early for us to be revealing anything” in terms of details about the record, he does feel extremely positive about the direction that he, vocalist James LaBrie, keyboardist Jordan Rudess, bassist John Myung, and drummer Mike Mangini are taking with it.

“The new album will be a further progression of the band’s creative identity,” he says. “Every time that we go into the studio, we always try to make something that’s better than the last. Everybody in the band has this kind of attitude where we love doing what we do, we’re very lucky to be able to do what we do, and we feel that the best is still to come. That’s partially why we self-titled our last album, because it signified a new beginning, and the strength of the belief that we have in the future of the band.”

Even so, he says, living up to Dream Theater’s impressive history can be rather daunting. “A new album project is like a fresh and inspiring blank canvas, and I love that every couple of years you have the opportunity of reinventing, trying something new and starting from scratch. But given the history of the band, you do have to take all of that into account and consider what we’ve done already, what we haven’t explored yet, and what will not only keep us interested and fired up, but will also keep people who listen to the band excited, as well. You really have to deliver the goods – you can’t rest on your laurels, you can’t get lazy.

“I think it’s cool being in a band where people look forward to your new music,” Petrucci continues. “So often, when bands have been around for many years, people just want to hear the old songs. I get the strong feeling that most of our fans look forward to the new things that we do. It’s like the same mentality of fans of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies – people look forward to the next part.”

The following article is from Revolver’s October/November 2015 issue.