John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess fan chat

Kim Sakariassen: So tell me about the new DVD – what’s that about?

John Petrucci: Well as some people may know, all last year we were on tour in support of Distance Over Time and also celebrating 20 years since the release of Scenes From a Memory, and we had a really great tour going. We hit Europe a couple of times, we did festivals, we did North America a couple times, South America. Just at the end of the last little bit we did in February, we recorded two nights of the tour in London, and so that’s what this DVD is. Unfortunately for our friends in Asia and Australia, Japan, South Korea and stuff, we did not get to bring the show there because of the pandemic; we were supposed to do that in April. So for our fans in that part of the world, they get to see the show as we would have presented it live in their countries. The DVD is the exact show and that’s what Distant Memories is.

KS: You say you filmed two shows – does that mean you mixed and matched footage from both shows, or did you choose one show as the main show to present?

JP: It’s mixed and matched. It’s mostly – audio-wise – from the second show. The camera shots are both shows; the director had different camera setups from one night to the next – and we made sure we all wore the same clothes! One night he had better a better audience camera set up or the on stage cameras, and the next night he had a better like track... I don’t know the technical names for these things. So he was able to choose either night and do that. Some of the audio is from the first night too, depending on how well – or not well – it went. But in general the band felt that the second night was the better of the two and so we use that as the core as far as the mix, what we’re presenting to everybody; but we mixed it up a little bit.

KS: And it’s the entire show that you played. Also you played two different songs on each night, didn’t you? So you have that as a bonus track as well on the DVD.

JP: Yeah. We were trying to play as many Distance Over Time songs as we could on this tour because we had such a great positive response to the record release in many places all over the world. It charted either number one or top five which we did not expect and so we had a lot of requests to play as many songs from the new album as we could, which is kind of unusual when you put out a new album, and we can only do that in the first part of the show; the show is in two segments with an intermission. We only had an hour to really fill with new materials, so in order to play as many of the new album songs we could, we swapped; one night we’d play ‘Paralyzed,’ one night we’d play ‘Fall Into the Light’. So that’s the only difference between the two nights. And the reason why [‘Paralyzed’ is] a bonus track is because the cameras [were] different from night to night, so night two had probably the more elaborate camera setup and ‘Paralyzed’ is the only song from night one that wasn’t repeated, so if people watch it they’ll notice it looks a little bit different than everything else; it didn’t have all the camera treatment that the other songs did. So for that reason we made it a bonus track as opposed to putting it in the main body of the DVD because we thought it might just look out of place a little bit.

KS: I’ve seen some confusion that some places that released the track listing only released like half of Scenes From a Memory, but of course it’s the entire album. So just so that we’ve clarified that.

JP: It’s literally the entire show, everything we played.

KS: ...and some bonus stuff as well – behind the scenes stuff. So what made you pick London as the place to record this time?

Jordan Rudess: London has become a really great audience for us over the years and we always try to do it somewhere different; we don’t want to like repeat ourselves, so we figured we can get the London vibe and it would be special in a classic place, very famous venue. So those factors led us to that place.

KS: Of course London used to be the headquarters for the official fan club back a decade or so ago. I got word from Kerry this morning that I should congratulate her and Richard on her 16th anniversary.

JP: That’s fantastic. We have a lot of friends all around the world who were there from very early on. The original fan club dates way back when the Dutch fans put that together, the UK fans, the Italian Dreamers... You know better than any of us Kim because you were the one that united all the stuff into Dream Theater World.

JR: Right. You finally got it organized.

JP: There’s definitely a long history with our fans and our friends in the UK. When we first started touring as a live band we immediately played in London. The Live at the Marquee was the first live album we did.

JR: The funny thing about London is when I joined in ‘99, I remember that London wasn’t always like what it is now. It was good, I mean everywhere is a good response, but we really saw it not just when we were playing like the Wembley Arena.

KS: That was the same in Oslo. The first show I saw with Dream Theater was back in ‘98, and that was like 1200 people or something, and then it peaked around Octavarium I think with 9000 people in the Spectrum. So let’s just bring in some questions...

Marcelo Nanjari: In the concert, in ‘Pale Blue Dot’s intro, we can hear a voice saying “Pale Blue Dot” but in the Distant Memories version, I can hear the intro of the studio version, not the live intro. Why?

JP: The DVD version is the same intro as the studio version. The live version was different, and so he might be hearing like the ambience from the live version.

JR: And why?

JP: And why? Because that’s the way the cookie crumbles! [laughs]

Youssef H. Youssef: Can we expect an individual Blu-ray release of Distant Memories at some point? If not, why? Just asking for myself and other people who’ve gone completely digital when it comes to audio and wouldn’t have use for physical audio.

KS: So I guess what he’s talking about is the only way you can get it is in the big deluxe edition.

JR: Yeah, the only way is a limited deluxe three CD with two Blu-rays and two DVDs artwork. The other Blu-ray I guess comes with a special edition three CD/two Blu-ray digipak in a slipcase.

JP: I don’t want to say the wrong thing and I could be totally wrong, but sometimes the label will do that down the road, and they’ll make things available. I believe we did that recently with Distance Over Time. We made something that was part of the box set available, but you’re talking a year down the road or whatever, for the same reason he was mentioning. But for the initial launch, it’s more of a special item in the package. I don’t know for sure if that’ll happen, but it depends on how patient you are. It might be something that it would become available, and I understand the reasons why he’s mentioning.

KS: I guess a lot of people don’t have the whole collector’s thing going on so they just want the bare necessities.

JP: Yeah. I mean it’s a different headspace. I’m not a DVD/Blu-ray guy, so for me, I’d be looking for more of the audio. I don’t know. That’s just me. And then some people are really into collecting. So everybody’s different but that’s the way we decided to package it in this case.

Scott Hansen: Often you guys have commented that you have too much material from your writing sessions that you can’t use. Being that you now are working in your own studio, and there is no deadline for producing a new album, will you limit yourselves to writing only 60-80 minutes’ worth of music, or will you continue writing to allow all these ideas to be used and then pick the best and/or most cohesive group of songs to release as an album, and use the rest of the tracks for bonus tracks, B-sides, soundtracks?

JR: We probably won’t make the world’s longest album. [laughs] We know how long we want this particular album to be, but it is true that we don’t have any shortage of ideas. We definitely have a lot of stuff, but we usually have a concept of how we want to present our album and our product.

JP: I understand what Scotty’s talking about. Some bands work that way where they’ll write an excess of material and then maybe pick the best ideas, but we just focus on what we want the album to be as a whole and we focus on each song. None of them are throwaway tracks; we don’t view it that way. If anything, if we need more to be used as bonus material or whatever, we’ll just write more, but we try to put the same intensity and care into each song as opposed to writing an overabundance and then choosing which ones are stronger or weaker.

JR: I guess the only thing to understand about us is that we always have a lot of seeds for things, but we really like to write together, just really craft the songs and be together in the room, but we do have lots of things. Like you need a beginning of something or an idea for something, we have a lot of those sitting around.

JP: Like Jordan said, there’s never a shortage.

JR: And then when we’re writing, we also have a lot of ideas that come up that maybe we’ll say, “Well that’s cool, but we’re not using that because it’s not right for this particular song,” or whatever. But our problem is not a lack of inspiration.

KS: I guess people are just remembering back in the old days when there was always a bonus track or something that was not on the CD like ‘Eve,’ ‘Speak to Me’ and all that those songs.

JP: Yeah. A little bit different times back then, different approaches and different reasons why we did stuff. Maybe something originated live and we never recorded it – that type of thing. I suppose it’s always fun and like Jordan said, there’s so many ideas we could write for three albums if we wanted to! [laughs]

KS: So are you writing an album right now?

JP: We are right now! You actually took us away from the writing!

JR: We were in the middle of a really cool part. I had to really write it down very well so I can remember what the hell it was.

JP: We’re gonna forget it all! [laughs]

KS: Oh no! [laughs]

JP: It’s probably the best thing we ever did! [laughs]

KS: ...and I ruined it all!

Liam Murphy: As you create more music, how do you or will you decide on setlists? Is the goal to make one set and then swap out a few songs here and there?

JP: It’s hard. We do have tons and tons of material and shows can only be so long. We’ve talked about this a bunch of times – there’s a lot of different schools of thought on this. One is have the set be consistent so that you can put on the best well-produced show as you possibly can; it’s almost more of a Broadway style. Certain bands do that; Rush did that a lot in their career. There’s the idea where you completely change the set constantly, which is more of the maybe jam band style, Zappa-style, Phish, Grateful Dead, and I get that too. That’s really hard to pull off for the entire band and crew. [laughs] I think if we were to compromise is what Liam had mentioned, which we did a little but maybe not to the extent that we could where there’s a core set and then we kind of swap out a few songs. This way it could be something different from night to night, but it could still benefit from the consistency of having a produced show. That’s probably the best way to do it.

KS: Of course on the previous tour, you did a full album; that holds a big slot on the time table.

JP: It did. The whole second act was accounted for. We only had an hour of the first set and the encore to play new catalog or whatever. This is not an excuse [but] it’s a reality the Dream Theater of music is for the most part pretty complicated for everybody, not just the band but for the whole crew – lighting, video and everything – to wrap their heads around... We’re not a blues band, so it’s hard to just say, “All right, ‘Octavarium’ tonight,” and everybody can magically play it. I would love to be a robot and be able to do that...

KS: You have to actually re-learn it if you have to play it again?

JR: Sure. Sometimes we’ll listen to stuff – like I remember being on the bus and John and I were listening to ‘Ministry’ or something we haven’t heard for a long time – and I was like, “Oh my God! This is really cool! [laughs] Wow! What is this part?!” Like you get a little perspective and you forget, and we definitely have to do some re-learning

JP: Yeah. I mean we’re not afraid of hard work and that’s all it really takes, but there is a time component, so it’s a little bit harder, less realistic for us to have let’s say another whole hour’s worth of interchangeable material prepared at any given notice. It’s a little bit unrealistic, but I get the whole desire for that.

Ryan Gibbs: What is the song that you feel you connect with the crowd most?

JR: I guess we could say we have favorites to play live, and the first thought that came to mind is every night I’d be so excited and into playing ‘Pale Blue Dot’ live. I just loved that song; it’s just really fun to play. To me it had a really great combination of kind of that epic sound, but also it wasn’t that long, and it has a lot of majestic kind of moments, and this felt [like], “OK, this is a really great one.”

JP: On the new album, [in] ‘Fall Into the Light,’ there’s a middle section that has a great connection moment with the audience, where everybody sings along to this very anthemic melody, so that that’s a good connection moment. Also ‘Spirit Carries On’ in the second set – we’ve seen some really beautiful seas of cell phone lights throughout the world and arenas and things like that. In fact, the behind the scenes thing that’s included in this release has some footage where it’s just a sea of lights and such a beautiful connecting moment. Also in Scenes From a Memory, in the song ‘Through Her Eyes,’ we did sort of a tribute moment to our fallen musician heroes. In the story the main character is visiting the graveyard to his past life self, but we took that opportunity – in fact the video artist Wayne Joyner did this – to show tombstones and show some of the musicians that we had lost. So you see the names come up on the screen; you see Emerson, Zappa, Cornell, Burton, etc. In fact, when Neil Peart died, we were on the road and I think it might have been the next night he had added “Neil Peart” to the thing. It’s just one of those moments that’s very emotional and the audience really connected so hopefully Ryan knows what I’m talking about; at the moment I’d look out in the audience and see people’s reactions, see some people sort of tearing up and or cheering for their heroes, so that was a good connecting moment as well.

KS: So you made an all-new animation for Scenes From a Memory; how much of that is visible on the DVD itself?

JR: Probably if you were there in the room live, you would see all of it, and on the DVD you see some of it, a good portion of that.

JP: There’s quite a number of shots that are pulled out far enough where you see it. Because of the way the stage setup was built, it’s kind of always there, so I would not say that you could watch it as if you were watching a self-existing movie and following it that way, but you definitely see the elements of it, you feel the elements. The other thing is that it contributes a lot to the look of the show, it interacts with the lighting and everything, so it has a lot to do with just the way the whole stage looks. I suppose it would have been fun to include all that footage individually on the DVD but we didn’t think of it, so thanks a lot! [laughs] I mentioned him before – Wayne Joyner, our video artist – made all that stuff. So he did all the videos for Distance Over Time that were released with that DVD [or] Blu-ray. Then when we brought in older material into the live show, like ‘Nightmare’ and ‘Presence’ and stuff, he did videos for all that. And then on top of that, he created from scratch an animated sort of manga kind of graphic novel approach to Scenes, so he was busy. He also designed actually the screen, which has a really unique look to it, and he also designed the painted backdrops for both set one and set two. So he was a busy man, and a very crucial member of our team. [On] the DVD, obviously it’s the band playing on stage live and it’s the interaction with the fans, but it’s just a testament to the amazing team that we have behind us that puts that on. That show is constructed night after night. Our crew... the the lighting director Steve Baird, our front of house engineer Ace, our monitor engineer Jimmy T, our tour manager, everybody.

JR: One of the things about our organization is we have this incredible family, people who’ve been with us for so long. Steve Baird our lighting guy has been with Dream Theater for longer than me I think, and he’s just so wonderful and amazing.

JP: You’ve been there Kim, you’ve seen the operation.

KS: Oh yeah, I’ve seen it all.

JP: Not to get into this whole topic, but it’s really frustrating for me to be in the situation we’re in in the world where there’s no live performances because all of these amazing, talented people are not working. It affects not only the bands, but the crews and agents and managers and promoters and venues, and it’s just something that’s been really difficult for this industry. It just got hit really, really hard.

KS: Yeah, because people don’t think that setting up a show like yours that’s 20, 30 people at least just getting that up. And none of them have any work for a year now almost.

JR: Exactly. And who knows when it’s gonna change?

JP: Yeah, it might be two years by the time we’re done.

JR: We keep hearing it gets pushed back. Nobody knows. That’s the reality.

KS: There’s a peak right now in Europe where everything is just going up again, so there’s no end in sight from here at least.

JP: Obviously we want everybody to be safe and that’s the most important thing, but they say at the same time, what job could you take off for two years from and expect to survive? Again, not to get into a whole negative thing, but just the reality of how hard the music industry, the live touring industry has been hit without any sort of opportunity to adapt or anything else.

KS: The venues are struggling, promoters are struggling, everyone is struggling because there’s no shows. Of course bands can to some degree at least do some events online like live streams, but I don’t think I’ve seen that that has been a huge money driver either.

JP: No, I don’t think so. I think maybe there are high hopes of that, but it doesn’t seem to have been something to really take off or replace the live experience.

JR: And that’s just something that people are figuring out as we go. I mean nobody was prepared for this. It wasn’t like there were systems in place for monetizing live shows. I remember years ago I did something on a platform that now has been discovered called StageIt, and now StageIt is one of the more popular places to do live shows, but it’s all new to everybody. So everybody’s figuring how can they do these, how can they monetize... It’s really cool to learn new things for everybody and maybe there’s a little excitement there to try out different things, but to actually replace revenue that comes from bands touring, it’s not there, it’s not happening.

Heine Melo: Do you write a song thinking also how it will be played live? Or there are songs only possible to be heard only in the album?

JR: We’re very conscious of that kind of thing because of our experience. For so many years playing live it’s definitely something we think about. A lot of the time, we’ll play a riff, and I think probably the first thing in our minds – if it’s like a really fast, low riff – we’ll go, “Well no one will hear these notes!” [laughs] It’s a question of do we care. Like, “Does it sound cool right now?” and how much do we want to pay attention to the fact that when we play in a huge venue in Norway, whatever, that they won’t really hear those notes? Also we’re very interested in how we can engage the audience. John was talking about parts in our music where people really sing along, so we’ll be in the studio and writing, and we’ll be like, “This is a great part, because everybody’s gonna sing along and it’s gonna be this great vibe!” So, yeah, it’s total awareness of that.

Sofiane Benidir: Greetings from Algeria. What is Jordan’s favorite solo from John? And what is John’s favorite solo from Jordan?

JR: The one that came to mind is your ‘Spirit Carries On’ solo because it’s a little bit like a Gilmour-ish kind of solo, but at the same time it has the Petrucci flavor and technique in it. I just love that, so it’s definitely a highlight.

JP: That’s awesome. Algeria – that’s some place that we haven’t been to yet and be nice to go there. We’ve toured so extensively in our careers, we’ve visited so many countries, but we’ve never been to Algeria.

KS: There’s almost 200 countries in the world, so you still have quite a lot.

JP: Maybe most people know this, maybe they don’t, but Jordan is an awesome improviser. Most of his solos that are on the albums are improvised. It’s like, “OK Jordan, time to do a solo,” and he’s just like, “Hey, that was good,” or “Yeah, I think I’m going to keep the one that I did when we wrote the music,” and it’s like off-the-cuff. One of those to me that’s recent that was one you did when we wrote Distance Over Time was the one at the end of ‘S2N’ where we kind of go in the slow sort of halftime jam and there’s this wicked, wicked keyboard solo there. I mean Jordan has so many amazing ones, but that’s a more recent one that comes to mind on the latest album, and that was improvised, so I hate you!

JR: Thank you! [lots of laughs]

Oscar Quintana Franco: In the new album will we see an eight-string guitar song and GeoShred? Apart from ‘Pale Blue Dot,’ are there any songs that Jordan uses GeoShred?

JR: We’re not quite there yet, but I think I’ll find some cool way to use GeoShred, especially now that I have just released all these amazing like orchestral solo instruments. Cello, violin, sax, flute, oboe, clarinet – they sound awesome. It was just released yesterday, actually. And just this morning I was thinking, “Wow! I gotta use like the cello, because it’s just so beautiful.” So yeah, I’m definitely gonna put something in this. We’ll figure it out. But eight-string guitar – I just asked you that yesterday.

JP: You did! So myself and the talented engineers over at Ernie Ball/Music Man – who I’ve been with for 20 years now, which is insane – we’re developing an eight-string model. The goal in all of our conversations was to have it available for me for the writing of the new record. We’re hoping to make that happen. You have to understand that with the pandemic and everything, we weren’t supposed to be in the studio right now, we actually would have been touring. The timeline got moved up a bit, so we’re gonna see if Ernie Ball/Music Man could get me something – even if a prototype – before we’re done writing this new record. That’s the hope, that’s the goal; we’re all on the same page and hopefully they’ll be able to do it, but just trying to be understanding with the time.

JR: But now you can just turn your low string down. [laughs]

KS: Well you already do a lot of different tunings, since I guess Six Degrees or later.

JP: The biggest one was Train of Thought. I just... I don’t know.

KS: All of the songs are in different tunings from that album.

JP: I don’t know what I was thinking. It just means bringing more guitars on the road.

JR: I was thinking to make this album heavier that I do like instead of an 88 note keyboard, I’d use like a 97 key for the low keys.

KS: You can just use the transpose button.

JR: [waves his hand dismissively but joking] That’s not as cool.

Kyle Offringa: What songs were considered for the setlist pre-tour but didn’t make the final cut?

JP: There were a bunch. I don’t know if I remember them off the top of my head.

JR: That’s a hard question. You gotta go back to our list.

JP: If you have slight patience I maybe... There were some songs going back and forth...

[after JP unsuccessfully searches his phone]

JP: We shred the evidence.

Amin Saffar: What’s your approach/favorite scale for writing riffs like ‘The Dark Eternal Night’ and ‘Pale Blue Dot?’ Do you always think about adding some notes to a particular scale for writing riffs?

JR: This question just made me think that a lot of times, a particular scale will be very inspirational to our compositional ideas. I remember when we were writing ‘Pale Blue Dot’ – I don’t know what it is he played for me – but John said, “Oh, you gotta hear this, because it’s a really interesting character,” and when I listened to the piece, I was like, “Wow, that’s really cool!”

JP: It’s the same one I used on ‘Terminal Velocity,’ the opening track on my solo album [which] is a good example of that harmonic major sound which is beautiful. ‘Pale Blue Dot’ has a section that has that.

JR: Yeah, but a lot of times we’ll just hear a scale, and it’ll just trigger us to write something. I remember when we were in the studio with Scenes, and we had my friend Tom come in, who was an ethnic professor, and he was showing us some different scales. I don’t know if we used whatever he showed us, but it got us in that head space. So a scale will definitely make it happen.

JP: One of the things I notice, and this is fresh on my mind because we’re literally in the studio right now working, when we’re coming up with riffs – in this case he’s talking about ‘Dark Eternal Night’ – they’re like single note-y sort of riffs, we break the scale rules constantly. So we’ll weave in and out of the notes that are diatonic to a scale. We don’t just say, “OK, this has to be this scale and we just stick to it,” unless we’re looking something that’s actually purposely more expected from the listener, like we want to keep this specifically [diatonic] because we’re looking for that tight sound. But for the most part we don’t do that. We always break the rules and we kind of weave in and out of the scale. It doesn’t end up sounding like this, but it reminds me of the whole bebop thing, where there’s all these approach notes—

JR: That’s a really interesting concept. I’m thinking the same thing from a different perspective, but we’re trying to write a cool riff and maybe it’s a heavy riff, but we don’t want it to sound too much like this or too much like that. Or maybe not “Oh those are just the blues notes, so let’s make it sound a little bit more special. How can we do that? Maybe add an element or something a little darker, a little cool.” So a lot of times different notes come in to it to create something that is just crafted in an interesting way, and it’s not any one particular skill.

JP: In fact we have a cameraman with us on this album who’s filming the process – not the entire thing, but a lot of it – so we’ll have a lot of material to be able to show people how this album went down. But one of the things would be interesting for him to capture is sometimes we’ll literally... It could be four notes and we’ll be like, “How about this?” Play it, and like, “Wait, how about this?” Then Jordan will [say], “Well it could be this,” and John will say, “Well what about this?” And then [I’ll say], “Wait – hold on a minute guys, what if it was this?” and it’s literally like 17 different interpretations of four different notes until somehow, miraculously everybody goes, “Yeah! That’s the one!” And you’re like, “Why are those four notes any different than the first four?” [laughs]

JR: All the options are open. There’s a million we could think of. We could sit there playing them all day, but to find the one that we’re all gonna be like, “All right! That’s it! That’s cool!”

JP: If at some point our cameraman can capture that process and see how sort of psychotic we are...

JR: And it’s a funny thing for guys like us who could think of a million different things to do. [laughs] We’re quick at finding the options but just to make it... It’s like the difference between improvising and composing. I can just play all day and play stuff but when you want to actually make a decision, it’s a whole different kind of a thing.

Michael Pzs: John, whose guitar tone blew your mind when you were first heard him? Also what was the motivation behind using a seven-string guitar on Awake? What brought John to the seven-string?

JP: As far as recorded tones on record, I can’t believe I have to say this because it’s so shocking, but the late Eddie Van Halen – I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his tone. I mean that Van Halen one was just one of the most ridiculous, unbelievable recorded guitar tones of all time. As far as the heavier sounds, when I first heard Master of Puppets back in the mid-80s going to Berklee at the time, I just connected with the sound of the guitars on that record. But it was local guys that I would see where I first got hit with that feeling like, “Oh my God! What is that guy playing through?” Every time, it was always a Boogie. It was like a local guitar player that I go see in clubs. I saw Jack Bruce play and our friend that played guitar was playing with the band and playing through a Boogie; it was probably a C+. Another local band again was playing through a Boogie and Mark IV. It always kind of came down to the Boogie, but it was that experience of being in the audience and hearing something come off the stage and just being like, “Man, what is that sound?!” Obviously in the case of Van Halen, that was a whole different thing that he was using. But anyway, we’ll miss Eddie – that was a big, big loss. There’ll never be another one like him.

KS: I saw there was a question earlier: would you attend or participate in a Van Halen tribute concert?

JP: I’d be happy to. It’s hard for me to think of anybody who doesn’t hasn’t been influenced by him. Along the way with electric guitar – amongst all of the incredible guitar players there are in the world who are mind-blowing – it’s only a couple that just changed the game, and it’s just sad to think we’ll never get to see him play guitar again.

Shreddy Mercury: What are three of your necessary rider requests?

JR: Well there’s gotta be chocolate.

JP: Yeah, Jordan is all into the chocolate.

JR: It’s gotta be chia seeds. [laughs]

JP: James has to have his bananas. It’s something with the potassium and his vocal chords.

JR: James almost got thrown in jail one time for his bananas. He was trying to travel in from South America.

JP: You can’t bring in produce!

JR: He was bringing bananas through, so they stopped him.

JP: There was a long period of time where double stuff golden Oreos were essential on the rider.

JR: Yeah those are pretty special.

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George Devia: What do you miss most from the very beginning of DT (Majesty and before) when you were not influential but you were rocking from music institute times?

JP: The things that you connect with when you’re that age. We were like 18 years old and I guess it was just the whole sense in some ways you miss it, in some ways you’re glad that you’re not in that position anymore, but I guess the unknown; it was all very exciting. We didn’t know what was gonna happen. We wanted careers in music, we were going to Berklee, we were following the path of our heroes, but who knows what was gonna happen? We certainly put everything into it and we had some great times doing it back then. You’re talking young guys, 18 years old, and fortunately we got to the point where our careers took off. So I guess it was just that sense of everything just being new and doing things for the first time and achieving milestones for the first time. Those things happen once and then they don’t happen again.

KS: So let’s bring it back to the Distant Memories DVD. It comes out in late November – I forget the date. You probably have it.

JR: The date when it comes out is November 27th.

KS: When you’re making a DVD like that, of course this is the second time you did Scenes From a Memory, so how did you proceed in trying to make that different this time around than the first DVD back in 2000?

JP: Back then when Jordan first joined the band and we recorded that album and went out on tour with it, we were fans of things like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Queensrÿche Operation: Mindcrime and bands in their prime presenting these unbelievably elaborate live concept album shows with staging and things and props and spectacles and videos, and we didn’t really have the means to do that.

JR: We had 50 inch TVs – what are you talking about? [laughs]

JP: Anybody that was there remembers the Live Scenes From New York. I mean we put everything we had into it. It was a fun, great show. We hired actors for the day, we had a choir, we had TV sets for video, we had different videos made by various people that were all different in style. So fast forwarding, now that we’re at a point in our career that we can present the kind of show that I think does the story justice, we were able to do as we talked about before – have a complete, from beginning to end, animated artist depiction of the story augmented with backdrop screen staging, the lighting that we wanted, whatever the props were that we wanted, etc. So it’s a much more realized presentation of Scenes than the original one. If anybody was there for the original one they get to see a whole different presentation of it, and for anybody who is a newer fan, maybe wasn’t around back then 20 years ago, then they were able to see this performed in its entirety which we hadn’t done since then.

KS: One of the differences is all of your gear has been changed out by this time, so you had to recreate a lot of that stuff. You had to recreate your guitar tone and you had to recreate all the keyboard patches or at least approximate them.

JR: It’s always interesting to go back and we wanted to sound like the album, but at the same time, we have all this new, improved gear, so there’s stuff that we can do to maybe make it even better. I would dare say some of the tones that we achieved are just cooler. The technology has gotten so much better, so the sounds are more pristine and so that makes a difference too.

JP: The parallel with me is that it also coincides with 20 years being with Ernie Ball/Music Man. So actually on that Live Scenes From New York, I was using a prototype, I believe, of my first JP model with Ernie Ball, but that’s something that’s been developed as well. It’s crazy that they’re both 20 years ago.

JR: I was telling the yesterday or the day before, when I met John and saw all of his gear, he had like one or two refrigerator racks filled with stuff – like amazing stuff.

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KS: What I noticed about the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ video is that this venue is seated and that’s a new one that I’ve never seen before in a Dream Theater live DVD, at least not in in that way.

JR: Yeah, the seated thing didn’t thrill us. [joking] We were talking about the idea of putting like a little electric jolts in the people’s chairs to get them up, but didn’t fly though. [laughs]

JP: The nature of that kind of venue, a theater like that, a seated venue – obviously all throughout the world there are different styles of venues: standing, seated. It’s a different vibe; it depends. It depends on the country and everything else. Seated venues tend to give a little bit more of a mellow-ish approach because everybody’s comfortable, but there’s something to be said for that too, because the environment is usually the more ornate, beautiful settings as well, so that you have that trade-off. Sometimes, some of the non-seated arenas and things like that are pretty basic; so you got people standing on cement floors for three hours.

KS: I think it’s time to say goodbye.

JR: Thank you so much for putting this together, our team to make these things happen and all the fans who came to participate today and ask questions and be part of it.

JP: It’s very cool, and we’re looking forward to this DVD coming out. Our engineer Jimmy T, our beloved, mixed this. This is his first mixing job for Dream Theater and he did a fantastic, amazing job. I’m excited for people to get to see this – especially now where there’s no live concerts, so people can crank it up and can watch it, and pretend they’re there until we are in happier days where we can all meet again in person. And in the meantime, we’re working on a new album.