James LaBrie interview

Oui FM: What are your feelings about this album?

James LaBrie: We feel great about it. I think it’s a great display of Dream Theater getting in and making definitely a heavier album, and songs that are extremely hard-driven, very concise, very spirited. There’s a simplicity to it that really just speaks loudly of being driven by the melodic sense, by being in the same room together, feeding off of each other’s energy. So I think it really had a lot to do with creating this great hard rock, heavy rock album.

OFM: You just said that the tracks are more concise. Did you have that in mind before going into the studio?

JL: Yeah, we definitely did. It’s very natural and easy for us – at any given moment throughout the process of writing a song – to say, “OK, right here, we can take off and go off on a six-minute progressive interlude and go absolutely crazy,” which we have done throughout our career. But I think whenever something like that was happening with this album, the red flag would be thrown on the field, and we were like, “No, no, no. Remember, let’s just keep it going straight. Let’s just keep moving forward. Let’s save that.” There’s a little bit of that in tracks like ‘Falling Into The Light’, or ‘Pale Blue Dot’ is a great example of that. ‘At Wit’s End’ is very cool. Signal-to-noise – ‘S2N’ – that’s still there. You still have your progressive side, or the more deeper side of Dream Theater, but we really just wanted to focus on, “Let’s make these songs something that’s very focused and concentrated and rock-driven,” in the sense of getting in and out and making a very powerful statement.

OFM: Why did you choose this approach at this point in your career?

JL: I think when you’re coming off an album like The Astonishing – two hours plus, a rock opera, opus – it’s just a natural progression for us to say, “How does a band usually form?” A band usually forms when you've got however many guys are in the band, first and foremost, where do you meet? You meet in a room. You’re all together. It’s that vibe, that energy that starts to create who and what you are musically. With that being said, this was what was so advantageous to us – being in a remote location, being in the room together, being a more collaborative effort, and saying to ourselves, “Let’s just write a great heavy rock album.”

OFM: Can you explain the title Distance Over Time?

JL: Well, if you look at it, you got the human skull and you got the robotic hand. The first thing you think about is Hamlet and you think of “to be or not to be.” But I think it really is indicative of the kind of world that we live in today. You have the human element and then you have the technological era. If you look around, we’re inundated with technology. Society and the way that we interact with one another is very different, and so if you look at those things it’s easy to imagine that if we don’t stay focused on what really matters, that it would be easy for us to lose the human element along the way, and then does technology overtake and there’s no longer balance, so do we create a new world? So the distance over time is the inception of humankind to where we are today. There’s so many transformations that are happening at an alarming rate. It’s just a matter of let’s not forget ourselves along the way.

OFM: Tell us about your musical contribution to this album.

JL: Music-wise? Not a lot. I would always be involved in the sense [of] hearing things go down, if I didn’t like something, I would make suggestions – “You know what? I’m hearing this,” or, “What you guys are doing there? I don’t know, guys. It’s not hitting me right.” I’m very vocal, but predominantly speaking, my involvement always starts with vocal melodies, and in this case, lyrics. You’ve got to remember, you’re in a room, there’s four other guys with their instruments, and things are just flying at an alarming rate. It’s like a locomotive flying down the track, and it’s stopping for no one. I only speak and I only get involved when it’s necessary. To me, it’s not a matter of, “Oh, I’ve got to be a part of this to feel a part of this”? No.

OFM: You wrote the lyrics for ‘At Wit’s End’, ‘Out Of Reach’ and ‘Viper King’. Can you tell us about them?

JL: ‘At Wit’s End’ is obviously about women being sexually abused, sexually assaulted. And if you think about the Me Too movement right now, it wasn’t necessarily inspired by that, even though I completely support that. With me, I’d read an article on how these women – far too many of them – unfortunately, can never really regain or find themselves again. It affects their relationships with their boyfriends or husbands. So they feel they’re stained, they feel that they’re damaged, and they are psychologically going through a lot of healing and therapy. So it’s my telling of someone that’s expressing themselves, saying, “You have no idea what this is like and how difficult it is. And will I ever be the same? Not sure.” So it’s to bring awareness to a subject matter that is heavily on the minds of many people around the world. But at the same time, I think if you sink into it, it can be very encouraging as well, because in that song the partner is saying, “No, you’ve gotta move on and you have to realize that you’re still a great person, the same great person that you’ve always been.”

‘Out of Reach’ is the same. It’s about a girl wanting to rediscover love. She’s been through a very upsetting situation, losing her lover, and then wanting to open herself up to love once again. She’s going through guilt. She doesn’t want to be hurt again, so she’s scared. And it’s someone’s observation of saying, how can I encourage or inspire her to once again feel that and get her to open up her heart once again? So that’s what that’s about.

‘Viper King’s just about having a great time and driving a roadster, a hot rod. In this instance, it’s about the Dodge Viper, which is an amazing vehicle. I’ve gotta get on the Autobahn with this and just let it rip. That’s our ‘Red Barchetta’ or ‘Highway Star’.

OFM: Mike Mangini, your drummer, wrote his first lyrics with ‘Room 137’. How did that come about?

JL: When we started to write this song, ‘Room 137’, he said, how about we set the tempo at 137? And then he went, “Room 137.” We have working titles, and I remember John Petrucci said, “Hey, that’s so cool. That’s not a working title. That should be the title.” And then Mike went on to tell us it’s based on physics. There was this gentleman by the name of Wolfgang Pauli who studied the number 137, which is a dimensionless number. It’s an alpha number. And it is responsible for a lot of the design, the ratio in a lot of our universe. So it’s a number that’s never been fully completely understood. It’s still one of these mysteries why it is. And Wolfgang Pauli, when he was dying, was brought into the hospital and he was brought into room 137. So he was like, “Is this a sign?” Once again, he was like, “I’m never going to figure this out. I’ve obsessed with this number all my life. Why are these things happening? And there’s so much more to this. It’s not just a fluke that 137 describes so much of what and who we are in this existence and in this universe.”

OFM: After the release of Distance Over Time, you’ll be touring the United States to promote it and perform your album Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory. Will you be doing the same in Europe?

JL: Later in the year, like maybe say fall or somewhere in that vicinity of time, we’ll come back and we’ll do a full headline tour with an evening with, and then it will be two sets. So the first set will be some songs from Distance Over Time and some other various songs that maybe we haven’t played for a while from our discography. And then all of Scenes From A Memory from beginning to end.

OFM: How do you see this album 20 years after its release?

JL: It’s still relevant. I think that if anyone is just discovering it now, I think they would feel that it still fits nicely and beautifully in today’s musical environment. It was our first concept album, it was our first album with Jordan. It was a very pivotal moment for Dream Theater, because at that point, we were coming off the Falling Into Infinity album and tour, and there was a lot of friction internally, externally. There were too many people trying to steer the ship, so to speak, so going into what became Scenes From A Memory was, “We’ve got to do it on our own terms – everyone else, stay out of it. You’ll get it when it’s finished.” And this is what we came up with. It was a tour de force album for us, because it was us just being who and what we were – “Let us be who we are, and if it works, great. If it doesn’t work, then we only have ourselves to blame.” Fortunately, it was a huge album for us. It was received extremely well critically and extremely well by our fans worldwide. It was a big moment. I’ve always referred to it as our second chapter. It was a whole new beginning for us.