Mike Portnoy comments

Liquid Tension Experiment – this was my first venture outside of Dream Theater. We made the first one [the ‘Liquid Tension Experiment’ album] around ‘97, came out ‘98; we made this one [‘Liquid Tension Experiment 2’] in ‘98 – came out ‘99. Jordan wasn’t in Dream Theater at the time. I was given the opportunity by Magna Carta [Records] to put together a project of my dreams; they said, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll get behind you and make it happen.” So, I really wanted to work with Tony Levin, being a fan of his, and I really wanted to work with Jordan Rudess because he auditioned for Dream Theater in ‘94, but ended up not taking the gig because he just wasn’t ready for the commitment. So when I had the chance to put this project together, I called up Jordan; I said, “Hey man, let’s do this,” and I got a chance to work with Tony Levin as well. And as the liner notes here, I tell the story behind the whole sessions, so if you don’t have the first LTE album liner notes, this is really important, and it tells the story how it came together. And originally, I was looking for another guitar player – I wanted it to be completely separate from Dream Theater. But at the end of the day, there was no better choice than my partner in crime with Dream Theater, John Petrucci. So I invited John to be a part of this, and LTE was born. We made these two albums, pretty much half-written and half-jammed. Half of the songs, you know, ‘Paradigm Shift’ and ‘Universal Mind,’ ‘Acid Rain,’ ‘When the Water Breaks,’ those are songs that we composed. But then the other component to LTE is the improvising and the jamming, so each one of these albums has a lot of great improv jams, and the interesting thing with this – we were making ‘When the Water Breaks,’ and that’s when John’s wife’s water broke. And she went into labor with John’s daughter Kiara, so that’s why we named that song that. He had to leave the sessions to go be with his family, and Jordan, myself, and Tony just ended up jamming for like two days. We ended up putting out those jams as the Liquid Trio Experiment, but a few of those jams we ended up using on this album; ‘914’ is just the three of us. But then ‘Liquid Dreams’ and ‘Chewbacca’ were essentially jams with just the three of us, and then John wrote guitar parts to them, and we turned them into a song that way. So, a weird thing. And then obviously, as you know, as a result of these two albums, John and I posed the question to Jordan, “Hey, hypothetically if you had the chance to join Dream Theater again, would you?” And he said yes, and the rest is history. He joined Dream Theater after we put this one album [‘LTE 2’] out. Yes, I get asked about this all the time – we would love to do more Liquid Tension Experiment. We’ll see; fingers crossed.