Jordan Rudess interview (excerpts)

Junkman: Welcome back to NAMM. How many is this for you now?

Jordan Rudess: Oh my god, it’s got to be like 20 shows. The only reason I miss it is because I’ll be on tour sometimes and then I just can’t come. Other than that, I’m here.

JM: And this year very special because you got an award for the Hall of Heavy Metal History. So nonetheless, you got an award the other night. Tell us a little bit about how you feel about that and how that all came about.

JR: It’s a little bit mind-blowing. I mean, when I consider myself, I don’t necessarily think of myself as that heavy metal character, but there’s a reality to the fact that there’s a certain element or part of my life that’s spent creating metal music, composing it, playing it, and I really enjoy it as well. So it’s cool. I mean, I’m a Juilliard-trained classical musician, kind of straight-laced kid like this playing Bach, Mozart, turned progressive metal keyboard player. And now, of course, I still play classical music. I do everything depending on the mood. So getting that award is wonderful, mind-blowing, it’s an honor, and really cool.

JM: Well, you and your fellow bandmates have been known throughout the industry for just having so many different side projects and so many different styles of things that you can do. A lot of people that might not know, he was a child prodigy back in the day and went to Juilliard as he just mentioned, and again, now he’s got this like the ultimate progressive rock band, Dream Theater. I mean, this is kind of—if you guys have been around for so long, you’ve been with them for like at least 20 years, right?

JR: 20 years, yeah.

JM: Unbelievable. Just when you think that you can’t go any farther with it, you’ve got new music coming out again, you got another tour coming out again, you’re collectively gonna get together after putting all these other projects on the side and things like that. You’re just still the busiest guys in music, I think, anyway.

JR: There’s no shortage of ideas or desire or energy to do this. And that’s really what it’s about – having the energy and the passion. And all the guys in Dream Theater are forward-thinking, forward-energy kind of guys. We love what we do. Luckily, we get along, we have a great organization around us that keeps us sane and doing this. And there are so many aspects to keeping any rock group together. And so I feel lucky to be involved with guys in an organization that can do that. And for so long. It’s great. So I’m inspired to go into the studio with them. We’re gonna go in probably in May. I’m enjoying the time off, which is amazing. A break from the road because we were on the road for two years. We did The Astonishing tour and then we went right into the Images And Words tour. It was really intense. We took maybe a couple of months off. But hey, travel around the world and do it again! So this is a great break and I’m enjoying it. I moved out to California for a few months to get into my more technical kind of creative side and hanging out at Karma at Stanford University. I’m gonna enjoy that and then do some piano solo concerts on the West Coast and Europe and do like a ‘Rock To Bach’ thing and really show my path – literally playing some Bach and Chopin and some Dream Theater and some original stuff. And after I’m done with all that – back to the Dream Theater stuff and creating a new album. It’s gonna be really fun.

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JM: About new Dream Theater music, how do you bring it to the table? I mean, do you have stuff that’s completely written out and you bring to the table, or how does the process work?

JR: It works in a lot of different ways. The composition process for me can go from anywhere from just having an improvisation that becomes, “Hey, that’s great, let’s put that down.” Like, I was just listening to ‘Illumination Theory’ – there’s a whole middle section that’s like this really almost romantic expressive string part, and literally that came about because John Petrucci said, “Play something that’s really beautiful with the string sound.” And I played it and he went, “OK, let’s record that.” So it was totally off the top of my head. It wasn’t like sitting down and struggling over any chords. A lot of musicians have that experience where they’ll sit down and all of the sudden a great song will just kind of come out by putting their hands on some chords, and the next thing you know, it’s there. So for me as an improviser, sometimes I can nail that, sometimes that happens. Like for the Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence album, the same kind of thing – “Play something really proud and majestic.” “Oh, that’s great, let’s use that.” Especially having the instrument that inspires me, that could potentially happen – and it did happen on that album.

But the other way the things come up is maybe in soundcheck. Like for the next album we have some things and cool riffs that we were just banging around in soundcheck. And the other way that it can come up is literally I’ll sit there with a pencil and paper and compose and look at things. A lot of times John Petrucci will come up with a riff on the guitar and he’ll give it to me, and it’s something really linear, like some single notes, and I’ll say, “That’d be really cool. OK, I’m gonna write that down and I’m gonna compose something that can go over that.” Like an example being in ‘Breaking All Illusions’ – towards the end, there’s this almost like Zappa-like kind of progressive weird chords. He gave me this thing and I said, “OK, let me work with that.” So it’s a real compositional kind of thing where I can sit and figure and look. So a lot of different ways. And we’re gonna do that for the next album. Again we have some ideas that we were banging around. There are some recordings I have in my voice memos, little riffs that I played in my dressing room. And probably if we were smart, we’d go back to my Facebook live streams and check out some of whatever that is, because there’s some cool stuff there as well.

JM: How do you break it down from like a three CD set to one CD set when you’ve got this many ideas?

JR: I know, it’s really hard. I mean, that’s one of the hardest things about our particular situation in that there really are a lot of ideas, and we want to put a lot of stuff, and we enjoy the long form. It’s natural for us to do that, especially coming from a more classical place where I learned to take a theme – and it might be like a motif – and then you can develop the motif. So if you have something in the melody or the right hand, how about switching it to the left hand and then adding some chords on it? How about inverting it and all these different things? That’s not really such like a pop kind of rock thing where it’s more song format. So we enjoy both forms, but we love to really go for it and make the most of the music, which can get long.

So a lot of it is figuring out how to make it a little bit smaller. John Petrucci does a lot of that massaging or taking what we have and making sure that it fits into what’s gonna really work as the producer, which he does a wonderful job at. So it’s a real combination of efforts. I mean, left to our own accord we’d probably write a four CD set or who the hell knows what. So it can get pretty expansive.

JM: And just knowing that, how do [you] know when it’s actually done? There’s so much material and so much effort that goes into this. This is the way that it’s gonna be, and you said John Petrucci’s got a big part of that.

JR: What’s interesting in my career with Dream Theater is that when we set out to record an album, first of all, we always have a very strong concept of what it’s gonna be before we start – we kind of envision the music, we envision the effect, we make a real plan and try to follow through with that. One of the things that happened with The Astonishing, which is our last album, which is kind of like a rock-opera thing, is that we actually had many more ideas than we used. A lot of times we’ll apply ourselves to the album knowing what we wanna do, and what we create is what happens.

So there’s not a lot... you know, you hear about bands, “Oh, that song is on the cutting-room floor.” Or, “We threw that one away.” “That one didn’t work.” “The record company said this or that.” But with us, it’s not usually like that. But for The Astonishing, we did have a lot of ideas that we didn’t use – not because they were necessarily not good ideas, but because we were trying to really craft something that helped to tell the story. So maybe something just didn’t work as well. So we have some things kind of in the can or whatever – they’re nice ideas that weren’t part of it.

JM: So you think maybe in the next, in 2018–2019...

JR: Astonishing Unreleased Tracks. [laughs]

JM: Exactly!

JR: It’ll be a little side thing. You’ll need a secret code to get in there and find them.

JM: New music thing – ETA – you think it will be...?

JR: We’re not gonna get into the studio ‘til May. So it’ll take some time to create it, and then once we’ve composed it all and recorded it all, and then to make all the packaging and all the stuff, and who knows? It’ll probably come out, let’s say, in a year or so, or maybe a little less. And we’ll hit the road sometime after that. But May is the time when we’re looking to get in the studio again.