Living The Dream

Prog-rock band defies trends to release epic collection

Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess firmly believes that music listeners' attention spans are dwindling.

Despite that, his progressive rock band known for its intricate musical stylings released its most ambitious album to date: the two-disc collection The Astonishing.

"It's certainly not the thing that everybody's doing," Rudess says via telephone. "We're going in the other direction because of what's going on in the music business and society.

"People have limited attention spans. They buy single songs, stream music, listen to music while they're doing other things. Dream Theater is a unique entity. We have the very rare position of being able to do what we want to do."

That includes playing The Astonishing from beginning to end in concert. The tour comes to the Mesa Arts Center on Thursday, May 5.

"We just recreate this album," he says. "We're also making a bit of a statement. We want people to listen to this, ideally, from beginning to end. It's very entertaining and fun for people to hear. It's something positive to what's happening in the world, as far as our ability to listen to music and the ability to get deep into the concept.

"We're not demanding that people do this. But in a way, we still support the idea of listening through and enjoying music that has some depth."

According to Dream Theater's record label, The Astonishing paints a tale of a retro-futurist post-apocalyptic dystopia ruled by medieval-style feudalism. It's a place aching for a Chosen One to rise above the noise and defeat an Empire defined by the endless drone of noise machines and the illusion of safety in bland conformity.

"We wanted to do a concept album," he says. "That was our goal. When we started to get into it, we quickly realized that it would be fun to present what we're doing as an entire show/experience.

"We thought that if we're going to do this, if we're going to do this live, we're going to create an evening's show so that it had some substance to it."

In terms of writing the album, Rudess says it wasn't difficult because the band was inspired by guitarist John Petrucci's story.

"With the detail of the story that John Petrucci wrote, it wasn't hard to create that much music. It was like doing a film score or writing a musical.

"We wanted to support the story and bring it to life. It turned into something that was pretty big. It was a great creative project. It allowed us to do so many things that we just found to be really creative and really very satisfying."

For Dream Theater as a whole, that means creating a book and a video game to complement the record. Rudess has the opportunity to tap into different keyboard styles during the recording process.

"There was a lot of piano work and orchestration," says Rudess, who will release an instrumental solo album this summer. "I got to use my electronic sounds and instruments. We wanted it to be as broad as it was very satisfying for me as a musician."