John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess, James LaBrie interview

Roadrunner Records: What is your favorite song in The Astonishing?

James LaBrie: I always find that it changes whenever we do an album where I might be leaning towards this particular song. But right now for me personally, ‘Ravenskill’ really conjures up the human imagination. It's very dreamlike. It epitomizes what Dream Theater is all about: very theatrical, especially with this album as a whole. But just even the lyrical content, I found even when I was singing this that it was easy for me to put myself into the character of that particular piece. We're basically talking about Faythe; she's coming in to find Gabriel, because she wants to communicate with him that she has set something up for them to meet with her father Lord Nafaryus. Just the way that it interacts between her and the other people is very dreamlike to me. When I hear that song, it's ethereal, as well. It just seems so perfect, it seems so angelic. But at the same time it goes into something that's extremely powerful both musically, lyrically and melodically.

RR: Was it difficult to sing the parts for numerous characters?

JL: It was definitely a challenge. I think what helped is these guys, John and Jordan, would get me the music, so I was sinking into the music, first and foremost. Then John would send me a synopsis of the characters and how he felt that they were hitting him, and what they represented. Once I had the lyrics and the melodies in front of me, then I could really start to put together how I wanted to vocally represent each and every character.

I was thinking this when I said it to Rich when we were in the studio, but the normal approach to an album – and it's just songs – you'll come up to a part where you go, “I can rasp that out and get really ballsy,” but I couldn't do that because I'd be singing Arabelle. Or I'd be singing Faythe and I'd go, “Oh jeez, I can't use my rasp,” but I've still got to make it powerful, but not too powerful. So it was very challenging in that aspect because I would sing it and then I'd say, “Rich, play that back to me.” And then we'd play it back and I'd go, “That's not gonna work.” And then John was getting this stuff on a daily basis and there were a few conversations where John would say, "Ooo you know, I think you went too far that way," which was great because then it made me rethink the whole interaction and what it was that I was representing at that particular time with that character. But it was exciting. I gotta tell you, this was something unprecedented for me personally. I think for the band, we were really excited to see where it was gonna go, and where it had to go.

John Petrucci: I think James is going to need therapy after this. There's only one character, I think, that doesn't have a vocal part in it, so he embodied seven different characters. [lots of laughs] At any given moment, he had to be one of those people.

Jordan Rudess: Are you gonna get confused on stage? Like singing the Gabriel part like Nafaryus.

JL: Well, yeah, right? Because I have to do such quick shifts.

JR: Which voice is it?

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RR: How long ago did you create The Astonishing story?

JP: It's probably about two and a half years in the making when you're thinking about the initial idea to do a concept album just as a general idea, and then creating the story which was the very first thing that really had to happen, and then gradually collecting the musical parts and going into writing and everything else. So I would say, yeah, about two and a half years ago that process started.

JR: It's probably the largest experience that we've ever created as a band, musically and conceptually. It's a very impressive kind of story, and it's deep, and there’s a lot of detail. It's a total meal for a band musically and conceptually.

RR: What was the most challenging part of the process?

JP: What we tried to do is create something that was more than just an album and was going to exist as an actual show. So that was one of the first things – we knew we had to write something that was gonna basically be a stand-alone performance or event, which was a really big undertaking, because that meant that we needed a ton of music to fill that. You go see a Dream Theater show, it's an ‘Evening with’, there's two acts, there's an intermission. You're talking over two hours of music to write. So basically we wrote two full albums worth of stuff, and keeping that organized both in following the storyline and musically making everything relevant was a big, big challenge. We literally were just talking about this – there are some old-fashioned ways with index cards and things you can do. It's kind of like screen playwriting and movie storyboarding and stuff, but there was actually a program that I used that was very helpful in that sense. The organizational part was a big component.

JR: And especially because when we ended up the last world tour, we started to talk about what we were gonna do, and we were all so inspired about it. Literally, I think the day that I arrived home, I was sitting at the piano already, sending the guys ideas, and like, "Here's another one! Here's another one!" And so we ended up with so many things to sort through and work with and organize. It’s a big, big job.

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RR: Did you enjoy working with a concept?

It allowed us to create something that is very dynamic. You listen to this album and it's like in waves. It might get really, really heavy, and then all of a sudden it's really beautiful and really mellow. It was fun to write on every level. To call upon us to write a lot of different kinds of music, not just one kind. You're doing something very orchestral, very subtle and then something very old, heavier, Dream Theater stuff.

JP: It was all driven by the story. So the music structurally is very unpredictable be.ause you're not just sitting down and writing a traditional song, like this has a verse and a chorus and this and that. It reminded me of when you watch the old time film scoring, where the thing’s playing, you see the orchestra, and as the movement on the screen is changing, the music is changing, and the music is so complex and varied and weirdly angular sometimes and very beautiful, like Jordan was saying, because it's based on what's happening in the story. It's not based on writing a song in a traditional sense.

RR: Do you have a favorite moment in The Astonishing?

JP: For me, there's a very dramatic moment in the second act. It's actually two songs that are back to back. It's ‘The Walking Shadow’ and ‘My Last Farewell’. It's a high point to me on the album I think because it's a culmination of a bunch of things happening. It's a very dramatic moment. I really love that.

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RR: Did you have David Campbell in mind from the beginning?

JP: We want to have this album orchestrated – “Let's get David Campbell!” [laughs] I had actually watched a Muse ‘Making of’. I watched it and it's like “Who's this guy?” He was conducting the choir and he was...

JR: I remember you sent me his resume. I was like, "Oh my God!"

JP: It was like, "This guy would be great." It was one of those things [that] almost reminds me of applying for college – like, “I wannna go to this school.”

JR: “Yeah, we’ll go to Harvard.”

JP: Yeah, there you go.

JR: “Julliard.”

JP: I'm gonna apply to one school, and that's what we did.

JR: And he said, OK.” We were like, “Oh my god! Danny Campbell said he’ll do it. Wow! Amazing.”

RR: What was the process of working with David like?

JR: He was so great to work with. He's a really nice, kind of mellow guy. We've had some very long conversations with him, but he just does the job so beautifully. We started out and we thought we were just gonna write some music, maybe just lay down some basic tracks and then hand it to David and let him do his thing, which I'm sure would have been very nice. But of course we're so crazy and we wanted to hear it in its glory when we were in the studio, so we did our best to orchestrate it and use my synths and samplers and whatever to make it sound like what we wanted and knowing also that we would give it to David. I wasn't looking for my very like best string sound necessarily. So we would do that and then we would hand it to David and talk about what we wanted to have. We gave him something that sounded pretty cool and then he did his magic. One of the greatest things about what David Campbell does is he has so much experience in this business that when we would give him stuff, he would say, "Oh well OK, this we can do with these people in Prague, and we'll get this conductor, and we'll get this cellist, and we'll get this guy." He knows where to do it and who to use and how to schedule it, and he's just amazing at that. He was able to totally make this happen. Using somebody like that is beyond just asking somebody to do an arrangement; certainly you can do an arrangement beautifully, but just his experience and his musicality...

JP: He pointed, “That's the gospel choir we'll use.” We had different things on this album that are, in addition to the orchestra and choir, we had a marching band – there’s a Dixieland segment – it sounds funny, but you gotta hear the album. There's a bagpipe guy; he just knew every guy. "Oh we need a banjo guy. We need a mandolin guy." And that was huge – that's just as much of an undertaking as this whole story thing we're talking about – was organizing all that because again, with every aspect of this album, there was just so much music. So everything was a huge undertaking.

JR: Just keeping track of all that... For you as the producer to have to not only write the music and write the story, but then to have to deal with like the orchestra, to talk to David Campbell and make sure everything is going on schedule – people have no idea what is happening on that level. It really is so much detail work.

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RR: Do you have a favorite memory of working with David?

JR: I have a memory – I don't know if it's a favorite memory – but it's a funny memory of John and I, we were on tour and we were in some town way up north in Norway. And we had to have this conversation with David Campbell, basically going through like the whole thing – we needed to talk through the whole thing. We thought, “It'll take 45 minutes, an hour, just kind of get through it.” I think we started maybe around midnight or 1:00 in the morning. We didn't end up until like five or six in the morning. We were on Skype and he... it was a major time difference. It wasn't that late for him. So we're sitting there and we're getting really, really tired and I brought some chocolate and he had some stuff and we're like, we're eating like all this garbage just to try to stay awake.

JP: Oreos.

JR: Yeah, Oreos. Our tour manager is delivering us more candies. We were desperate – we needed to have this conversation, and anything to just stay up and do it. And David is, as I said, pretty mellow. He's talking nicely, calmly, and we're like, watching the time go by. Finally, like, 5 or 6 in the morning, we were kind of through. We were like, “Wow, OK. See you tomorrow.”

JP: There was some good moments where we weren't actually at the sessions, because some happened in Prague, some were in LA, whatever, but we were able to Skype in or actually listen to the live stream. It was amazing to see those moments happen right before us. Here's music that we've been working on for all this time. This is what we envision it sounding like. All this back and forth with David and how he's going to do it, whatever. And now here are all these people in the studio, let's say it was the choir and they start singing and we're like, "Wow! Oh my God!"

JR “Hey, did we write that music?"

JP: So that was really cool to see.

JR: And they all had their own spirit, like listening to the conductor talk. I think the New York conductor went off to Prague to work with the orchestra there, and just hearing him interacting with the orchestra and listening to this pretty amazing orchestra. They would play the hardest thing; it would take them like three or four takes. You'd start out, they'd play it once and go, "Wow, what's gonna happen?” The second time, "That's not bad." "Oh wow, OK, they got it! OK, moving on to the next thing." And it kept happening like that, which was cool. They had a very serious vibe, methodically going through and doing that. But then when it came to the choir, They were really upbeat. You could tell they really loved the music and it was just fun to hear them interacting. You know, it's great.

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Fan question: What direction do you feel the band is gravitating towards in terms of genre?

JL: This is an album I think where we're pulling from every musical style that we've ever incorporated in the history of Dream Theater, whether it's prog or heavy or just hard rock; we even have stuff that sounds a little folk-like at times. Classical.

JR: And don't forget electronic.

JL: We're always into the electronic. But yeah, I think it goes right across the board, so diverse stylistically.

JP: You know what? Everything was appropriate to whatever was happening in the story. There's certain musical directions that lend themselves... we have like a memory that's associated with this. If there was a section that maybe had to be a little comical or light, we might pull from a certain style; if something had to be really serious, we'd pull from another style. If something had to be maybe foreshadowing, there’s all these things that a lot people relate to that brings them right to that space. So musically, we were very open to all those styles. We did a whole bunch of things that we never do normally.

JL: I remember being asked that on other albums too, like, “Where are you headed musically or what genres are influencing you?” and I said, “I don't think that really applies to Dream Theater,” because it's wherever we are at that given moment and what it is that we're trying to accomplish musically. So we're gonna pull from every palette that we know exists to create that and conclude it. So it really doesn't apply to us, the ‘Oh, we’re going over here, this is where the direction that we're headed.’ I think each album has its own microcosm musically.

JP: To me, that's the essence of being a progressive band. To be in a prog band, what does that mean? To me, it means you can do whatever the hell you want.

JR: Right. We've always been like a fusion band in the sense that we bring in different styles to the whole and that's what creates the entity that is Dream Theater. And this album we reached a little further into our creative bag of tricks and created what it is.

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FQ: Will there be violin on ‘Whispers On The Wind’?

JP: ‘Whispers On The Wind’ has orchestration. I don't remember specifically if there's solo violin, but it does have string arrangement for sure.

FQ: How many songs are over 8 minutes?

JP: The album is sort of like watching a movie, so in a sense, it's all continuous. I mean there are certainly songs that stand alone, which was kind of a happy accident that happened too, because we were actually able to pull like, "Hey, this is a pretty cool song by itself. It's not just a score." So the whole album is continuous really. As far as a specific song being over eight minutes, there's probably only a couple of instances on the album where there's maybe like two chunks that are a couple of songs combined that flow together, maybe in eight minutes or so plus. But because of the nature of this – I don't want anybody to be disappointed – but there's no 20 minute epic one song or anything like that. The whole thing is an epic. [laughs]

JR: Exactly. People shouldn't take that to mean it's not proggy – it's very proggy. It's just the way that things are strung together.

JP: Yeah, there's 34 songs on the album and it's over two hours long. There's not one like ‘Illumination Theory’ or ‘Six Degrees’ song that's like a long 25 minute, 30 minute song. It's not like that. It's all different songs.

JR: Over two hour concept album.

JP: It's a little different in that sense.