Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

On choosing the set list for his Shattered Fortress shows, in which he revisited the Dream Theater catalog:

Mike: “First and foremost, I narrowed it down to songs I wrote the lyrics for. There’s about twenty or thirty songs in the catalog that were my lyrics and my vocal melodies, so I began the narrowing-down process with that. Then from there, I kind of just looked at the catalog, and it felt like most of the stuff from ‘Scenes From A Memory’ would be fitting. I wanted a big opener, and I knew ‘Overture’ and ‘Strange Deja Vu’ would be a great opener, and I knew the last portion of ‘Scenes’ would be a great encore. We did ‘Home’ and ‘Dance Of Eternity’ and ‘Finally Free’, which I thought was very, very fitting personally to end with, between ‘One Last Time’ and ‘Finally Free’ – those were both very fitting messages for me to have some closure with this. That right there was a big chunk of the set between the ‘Scenes From A Memory’ suite and the ‘12-Step Suite’, and I knew I wanted to have ‘The Mirror’ in there as well as kind of a prelude to the ‘12-Step Suite’. That kind of wrote itself. The only other thing I was thinking of possibly doing was ‘A Change Of Seasons’, and once I heard that Dream Theater is currently playing that, I decided I didn’t want to have to – you know – be doing what they’re doing at the same time.”