Jordan Rudess interview

Jordan Rudess: The last concept album that we did was Scenes From a Memory. That came out in ’99, I believe. So we felt like it was time to do one again. It was something that was brewing. We were really waiting for the right time, the right opportunity to do another concept album, and certainly wasn't the right time when we had the major transition about five years ago and got Mangini in the band. We had to get into the flow of things again. But recently, we really felt like it was time to do a very large project, and John Petrucci, who wrote the story, has been working on this for about two and a half years. When he started feeding me the story idea and he handed me a synopsis at the end of the last world tour, I read through and I got really, really inspired. It was just some great ideas – I like that kind of almost sci-fi, fantasy, futuristic type-of-thing.

And when I got home from the tour, I started to really come up with a lot of different ideas sitting at my piano very often, first thing in the morning, totally delirious, but somehow the musical ideas would come into my head. As he was developing his story, we also started to develop a lot of musical ideas – short things. I would just get a vibe at the piano and I'd send it off to John and say, “Hey, how about this one?” and then I’d get another one, “How about this one?” And we kind of got on a roll to where we collected a whole lot of music, which was great because we realized that we needed a lot of music, because we wanted to write a show right from the beginning. John likes to say this from the moment of its birth, [it] has been a large concept. We knew that we wanted it to be big in scope, so we put together a lot of ideas and set out to write a lot of music.

It started out actually with the two of us just working on our own ideas and sending them back and forth, and then we started to get together. I would go to his house, he'd come to mind, we'd work, and then finally we ended up in the studio working more like every day just to try to get this done. And it was a really intense focus because John had this very detailed, very involved story that we wanted to represent and bring out musically, which meant we had to almost treat it like a film score and apply the right music for the right characters at the right moments. So we would really very carefully chart out all the themes and all the parts and make sure that it all made sense. In a way, it's a lot more detailed on every level than you think a rock album should have to be, but we had a lot of fun with it. It was he and I in the studio composing the music for this, which was a new way to work, as well. We decided that the best way to focus on this level of a project is for he and I to be together with all my keyboards, his guitar, my computer and just make this thing happen and just compose this album, and that's what we did.