Mike Mangini interview (excerpts)

Artisan News Service: What advice would you give to aspiring drummers coming up in the game?

Mike Mangini: They have to follow their heart with what they practice, but they’ve gotta understand that it’s a business, so you need to learn how the business works, not only outside of yourself but with what you learn and how you relate to people and the kind of things you learn to play. I mean you’re selling yourself, but you can’t forget where you are. [laughs]

ANS: What was one of the biggest challenges for you getting the new album, The Astonishing, done?

MM: The biggest challenge for me was interpreting the initial music that was given to me, because there were no drums. So like, “Alright, I need to listen to this really as a whole piece to understand where I should kind of let loose or I should lay back a lot.” All that just to see it as a whole because I don’t want to play blindly or try to fit too much where it doesn’t belong, and if I see the whole picture it allows me to do that, but then again doing it’s a challenge because someone else composes and a lot of my career is working for people that write music. The biggest challenge is, ‘What can I do that makes sense to them and still make sense to myself?’ So it’s like being two people.

ANS: How did the characters develop? Was it always meant to be a concept album?

MM: From the beginning.

ANS: Can you talk about the writing process?

MM: John Petrucci put together the whole thing, and he organized it in a really amazing way. He used software, he had everything mapped out, and then he used our keyboard player, Jordan. When he plays, you see things, you see a landscape, you got a picture in your mind. It’s so visual it’s unbelievable. So there really is nobody better to help bring a story to life so you feel it and see it. It’s not something I do on my instrument, so when I experience it, it blows my mind.

ANS: Is there going to be any challenge bringing it to the live stage?

MM: Oh! It’s always a challenge! [laughs] I mean our audience holds up scorecards. [laughs] But that’s great because we do, too. We just want to deliver and make it something that translates and to give it every night is... that’s living. It’s not easy, but that’s living.

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ANS: What does it mean to be a part of Dream Theater?

MM: Everything because I’m sharing similar goals and aspirations and likes and dislikes on and off the stage. For example, off the stage, that’s a group of people that can get along. We know how to converse with each other and have discussions and just observe life and be together. On stage, we share the challenge of delivering every night. When we leave that stage, everybody knows just to a microscopic level what just occurred for three hours, and it doesn’t happen the first show, but we get used to it pretty fast, and then it’s like a team.