The Gift Of Music

Dream Theater return with their most ambitious album yet, and that’s saying something for a band who redefine progressive rock on a daily basis.

By Peter Hodgson

Dream Theater have never shied away from ambitious projects. The epic 23-minute ‘A Change Of Seasons,’ the narrative concept album Scenes From A Memory, the two-disc Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence (which explored all sorts of emotional and mental health issues)... But the band have never created a project as heavily involved and fully realised as The Astonishing. The band’s thirteenth studio album, The Astonishing is a two-disc concept record which tells the story of a post apocalyptic retro-futuristic world where music has been replaced with electronic noise. It’s your classic ‘dystopian world is awoken by the beauty of music’ storyline. And along the way, Dream Theater – guitarist John Petrucci, bass player John Myung, keyboard player Jordan Rudess, drummer Mike Mangini and vocalist James LaBrie – are given license to explore a variety of different musical forms to illustrate the story. LaBrie in particular seems to really sink his teeth into the opportunity, employing a variety of different voices and ranges to express different characters. We caught up with John Petrucci to discuss the challenges of such an immense musical project. “This album is so much music and it’s so involved and intricate that it’s definitely going to take time for people to absorb,” he begins.

Peter Hodgson: How do you put together a narrative like this? You guys have made concept records before but not in quite such an explicitly narrative way since Scenes From A Memory in 1999.

John Petrucci: Yeah, and this is even more complex and more involved than that one. The first thing that I concluded when we decided to do another concept album was, alright, this time we want to really make an entire world and make this be bigger than just an album, y’know? Make it be a double, two-act concept album. Make it be a live show. Turn it into a novel. A game. A movie. A musical. Anything else, whatever it may turn into. I saw this much bigger vision of the whole thing. So the first thing I said to myself was, ‘I need to write a full story.’ That’s the first thing I set out to do, about two and a half years ago. Once that was done, I was able to present the whole idea to everybody. But the story was the first thing that had to happen.

PH: It reminds me of the marketing for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in that there’s what you see on the screen but there’s also the whole world around it; the novels, the comics, the games. It all adds up to telling a bigger story than any one outlet can pack in, and I imagine this gives you that same freedom.

JP: It really does. And I love that as well. I’m a huge Star Wars fan and I kinda realised through liking things like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, to Star Wars and Hunger Games, whatever it is – Harry Potter, all that stuff – I kinda realised that doing something in a setting that’s far into the future and then combining it with the idea that there was a societal breakdown as far as how the structure of society works, but technology has moved forwards and there are things in that society that we don’t have now... I like that combination. I think it’s a really good, interesting setting to tell a story in!

PH: So in terms of writing the music, there’s a regal feel to some of the compositions, in keeping with the setting and characters. Did you research that kind of music specifically or was it more a case of calling on the kind of collective unconscious of what that stuff should sound like?

JP: Yeah, it was more from the collective unconscious. Jordan and I wrote the music. We started trading ideas over several months, and right on the heels of when our last tour ended in October or November 2014, we sat together with a piano and guitar and started writing, collecting ideas and most importantly mapping out this whole idea, storyboarding it and breaking it up and kind of figuring out what musical sections and themes were going to recur, how they were going to tie in, getting the timeline to work, getting the mythologies together... And so we wrote the music as a score to the story. That part of it was really complicated, but while we did that, we had all this freedom to explore different musical styles, and we just kind of did it on the spot. There’s one song with a tango section, and it was kind of accidental that we stumbled upon it. I mean, we might listen to some examples real quick to make sure we’re being somewhat authentic, but short of that, we just go for it. And then beyond that is the orchestration. We had David Campbell orchestrate it, and we could say, ‘We want to use a Dixieland band here,’ or, ‘This is supposed to be a battle hymn so we need a marching, military bent.’ Conjuring up those sounds in an authentic way with real instruments also helped drive that aspect forward as well.

PH: A song like ‘Three Days’ is a real kitchen sink song, with sections that pop up for a few bars. I love that kind of ‘turn on a dime’ stuff you guys do.

JP: That’s a good example. That song is very character-driven and we used almost like a comical approach, because I wanted to make the antagonist have a little bit of a weakness in his evil, and I didn’t want it to be 100 percent just ‘stone cold bad guy.’ So we stole a page from the whole Disney villain thing in the way they do that sometimes. So you’ll hear a little playfulness in the riffs, and a little bit of a comical approach. It makes the music associated with him stand out, so when you hear that sound you associate it with him.

PH: There’s some great variety in the vocals too.

JP: There’s a lot of planning in that. Obviously with a story this detailed, with all the characters and perspectives as far as the songs that have to come from different characters, we ran the risk of it being difficult for one person to pull off. We did talk about bringing in a female voice to do certain characters, but James eventually said, ‘Hey listen, this is something I feel comfortable doing and I want to do all the voices.’ So I gave him some initial direction, like, ‘I’m picturing this guy sounding like this... This guy is the head of the rebel militia, so he should be commanding when he sings. This is the main character and he’s supposed to be the saviour, so make him sound like a 20-year-old James LaBrie voice.’ And he took those ideas and recorded the vocals up in Canada for about twelve weeks, and he came up with those voices. He’d send it back to me and we’d take it from there. I mean... I don’t know how he did it, the way that he changes his voice so much. It’s really impressive. I love what he did.

PH: Let’s talk guitar! I see there’s a more affordable Sterling By Music Man version of your Ernie Ball Majesty guitar coming out, which is a cool opportunity for that design to reach more players.

JP: I used pretty much exclusively my Majesty Artisan series six string and seven string on the entire album. There’s just one song where I used a JP15 seven-string, but other than that it’s all Majesty, and it goes to show you how versatile that guitar is, to be able to do all of those different things. I love it. It’s just the greatest guitar on the planet! It’s so easy to play, it sounds amazing and it does everything you need it to do. And there’s more acoustic guitar on this album than on previous Dream Theater records, not only because of the scope of the amount of songs, but also because of the different dynamic ranges that I use. So my Taylor acoustic played a larger role. I used the new 960CE, and you hear it on the album: it has a really clear, full-bodied sound. And I used a Taylor 12-string. On this album, we recorded all real Steinway grand piano and Hammond B3. Normally we don’t. Normally Jordan uses his software instruments, which sound amazing, but on this record, because music plays a really pivotal role in the theme, I wanted to make sure that everything was as authentic as we can make it. So when you hear an acoustic guitar playing a lead role like in ‘A Life Left Behind,’ along with real piano, it’s such a great combination.

As for the Sterling line, licensing the design and making a guitar that is more affordable, they’re still really awesome guitars and they’re beautiful. The Sterling By Music Man line of my signature series covers a few different models. And if you’re looking to spend $800 US dollars or something like that, you can get a great guitar. Now we purposely... It’s not the same as playing a US-made version of a Majesty or a BFR. That’s a higher-priced instrument at a different level. But you definitely get the vibe, and you’re still gonna get a really great instrument that’s licensed and approved by me. It’s a really cool thing that we’re doing.

PH: Ever get the urge to play an eight-string?

JP: Y’know, we talked about it. We actually started designing a Majesty eight-string. We had some designs going, and it’s something that we will continue with. I’m not sure where in the schedule that will be. But I’m not a big eight-string player. It’s something that I think is really interesting and I’d love to explore, but with all the other different things we’re doing that kind of took precedence, we have been in talks for doing an eight-string Majesty that would be killer. I’m not sure when that would be but it’s something we’ve been talking about.

PH: So in terms of presenting the album live, how are you gonna do it?

JP: Well that was something right from the beginning when I presented it to the guys about basing everything off this story. I immediately wrote up this proposal that said ‘We’re gonna make this two-act, two-album concept and then I want to present that live, much in the way that Pink Floyd presented The Wall live. They just played that album live in two acts and that was the tour.’ So this is ‘Dream Theater Presents: The Astonishing Live’, and that’s the name of the tour – that’s what we’re doing. So we started working on the concept and production for the live show a year ago, working with a company to design and build a set where we could present this in the best, most creative way, and also create the content. There are a few parts to it: one is the visual element, where it’s a show that’s designed to kind of emulate the look of the different settings of the story, so if the story’s taking place in Ravenskill, it should look like that, and if it’s taking place in an amphitheatre, it should look like that. There’s also animation for what’s happening in the story. Then we have the orchestra and choir that was recorded by David Campbell, and that’s really intense. There are so many instruments. I think at one point when we were mixing we had upwards of 570 tracks of music on a single song. So basically the David Campbell stuff is going to be playing back along with the movie, and then Dream Theater will be playing live to that video content. So it’s kind of a big undertaking! We have a lot of rehearsing to do to get it right, but I think it’s going to look very cool.