John Petrucci interview

Doğu Yücel: I’ve got some questions for you about the upcoming album and upcoming Istanbul concert. I want to start with the album title, because it’s [a] very gorgeous, grandiose title – A View From The Top Of The World – and it’s also the closing track with 20 minutes. What can you say about this? Why did you choose this title and we’ll get to the art cover too.

John Petrucci: Well, we wrote that piece of music as an epic on the album. So we went in knowing that we were going to write a long epic song like typically Dream Theater does. And so when I was thinking about this subject matter, I was trying to think of an epic topic. I always had this thought on my mind about people in this world who are a lot different than me who choose to do what seem to be crazy, extraordinary things – like scaling Mount Everest or slacklining across a canyon, or deep cave diving, or surfing on 90 foot waves – just like insane things. And I was always like “Why do people do this?”. Like, “Why do human beings like strive to do these like impossible things?” So, that’s what I wrote the song about and so ‘A View From The Top Of The World’ is obviously a metaphor of being up there. Being up on the top of the wave or up on the mountain or up on a rope between canyons. So when I was thinking of a title for the record, there were a lot of different ideas going around, but one day I looked at that title and thought, “You know what? That would actually make a really cool album title,” and then it would also tie in because then the title track would be the epic. So it worked out perfectly.

DY: So there isn’t a meaning like Dream Theater looking at the latest year of the world, to mankind, and this desperation. Because I thought like that when I heard the title first.

JP: No, it’s more like what I described. It’s people literally being in a situation where they’re seeing something that nobody else has probably ever seen before. You’ve probably seen videos of people that are on top of mountain cliffs and they have wingsuits and they jump off on the wing suits and they’re seeing this unbelievable view that nobody else could see. It’s crazy.

DY: What about the cover? You worked again with Hugh Syme and there’s a rock between the mountains. There is a little shovel but bigger boots. How can we read this cover?

JP: There’s a bunch of things going on. This actual image is actually a phenomenon that is in Norway, where there’s a rock that’s between two mountains, and people come to see it all over the world. In working with Hugh Syme, [we were] trying to think of a way to make this album cover be something unique without it being too obvious, without it being too cliché, so this seemed like a perfect image. On top of the rock you can see there’s a viewfinder there, where you could look out on. And then there’s a song on the album called ‘Sleeping Giant’, so the boots are the giant’s boots.

DY: OK. You recorded this album for the first time in your studio. It’s called DTHQ, Dream Theater Headquarters. How was the writing and recording process compared to the previous ones? It must be different because you really isolated yourself because of the COVID situation.

JP: Well, the last album Distance Over Time was very different than anything else because the band went away to a house in a studio in the mountains during the summertime and it was a beautiful, beautiful location. The weather was beautiful. We were cooking, barbecuing outside and we just spent months up there in the mountains. Our Dream Theater studio – our headquarters – is in an industrial park, so there’s no scenery; the only scenery is inside the building. So it was a very different experience, but it is absolutely awesome. The first album that I wrote and recorded there was my solo album, Terminal Velocity in the March through May of last year. Then we went into the same studio, wrote and recorded Liquid Tension Experiment 3. By doing those two albums there, we proved that we could definitely make a great sounding record here. During all that time we were building it, getting more equipment in, perfecting it. So by the time that Dream Theater went in last October, it was just set up perfectly. I think that the album sounds really, really awesome. Our engineer Jimmy T is spectacular. Maddi, my guitar tech who runs a studio, is spectacular. Our mix engineer Andy Sneap, over in the UK, did a tremendous job. So as long as we have the right personnel who are smart and talented, we proved that we could make a really great sounding record there and it worked out awesome.

DY: Great. You didn’t work with Richard Chycki and you worked with Andy Sneap this time, which you were with him on your solo album too, and you are happy with his performance. He’s also Judas Priest’s producer and touring guitarist of them.

JP: Absolutely yeah. Andy is awesome. I’ve been a fan of his; I love the way Firepower came out. I think that Priest album sounds so awesome. When I did my solo album, I was trying to think of who would be a good mixer, and knowing Andy is so talented and also a guitar player, I thought he would be perfect. He did a tremendous job, as you said, on Terminal Velocity. So when Dream Theater wrote this record and the music came out very heavy, energetic, kind of more metal, I thought, “You know what? I bet Andy would do an awesome job with Dream Theater as well,” and he really did. He’s the type of guy that spends so much time on the details, doesn’t stop until he gets it right. He’s always questioning, asking, and he also mastered the record too which is cool. So, he mixed and mastered it. He did a tremendous job.

DY: I’m looking at the titles, the song titles, and duration of the songs and as a fan, I’m imagining things. The title ‘Awaken The Master’ caught my attention. Is there a horror literature, Lovecraft reference there?

JP: There’s not. That title, that song comes from the mind of John Myung – that’s a lyric that he wrote. John’s lyrical style – if you think about the songs that he’s written lyrics to – he comes from a very almost abstract, spiritual area, and so he told me recently that the master he was referring to [was] the heart. So, it’s awaken the heart and he explores that subject a lot. You know, ‘Breaking All Illusions’, ‘Learning To Live’. They’re very abstract, spiritual kinds of existential things that he writes about.

DY: His writing in ‘Learning To Live’ is one of the climax of your lyrics, I think.

JP: I love it. One of my favorites.

DY: What was the first song you came up for this album and the last one you finished?

JP: The first song that we wrote was ‘The Alien’ and I think it made sense for us to not only make that be the leadoff single – the first song for people to hear – but also the opening track of the album as well. With COVID going on and not being on tour, the world being shut down, when the band got together last October and we started writing and we were just so excited to be together and write music, that was the first thing that came out of us, and I think it has so much energy and positivity. So we felt like, “Let’s make other people feel the way that we felt when we got together.” The last song we wrote was ‘Awaken The Master’. That song is played on and written on an 8-string guitar. I have a new Ernie Ball/Music Man 8-string Majesty guitar that’s going to be released very shortly and I wanted to make sure that we wrote a song on the record, so I was waiting for the prototype of that instrument to come in, and it ended up coming in earlier this year, and so that was the last song that we wrote.

DY: Did you use it only in ‘Awaken The Master’ or on the other songs too?

JP: I used it only in that song, but it makes a brief appearance in ’Sleeping Giant’. I was testing it out and I layered a little bit of eight-string behind the regular tuned guitar, so you might not even notice it; it might just sound like an octave low, but I stuck it in there a little bit. But ‘Awaken The Master’ was fully written and played on the 8-string.

DY: If you have to pick one song to play live from the new album, which one would it be other than ‘The Alien’?

JP: It would be the title track. It would be ‘A View From The Top Of The World’ because it’s an epic, it’s 22 minutes long or so, it’s the title of the record. It really encompasses everything. I mean, with Dream Theater songs like ‘Octavarium’, ‘Six Degrees’, and ‘The Count Of Tuscany’, when they’re that long, they’re gonna go through all different moods. You’re able to do so much with that length of time. So that song really would be the one if we only had to play one. It would be that for sure.

DY: So [in] 2022 you will play in Istanbul for the 6th or 7th time, and because of this current period, we are extra hungry for any live music and you must be too, as a player. What are your plans for the tour, for the stage show? What can we expect from Dream Theater this time?

JP: Well, you’re absolutely right. First of all, we love coming back to Istanbul and playing in Turkey. We’ve been coming there for a long time. It’s beautiful there. The fans are awesome. You guys always give us such a great response when we play, so we love it. So, we have lots of friends there and enjoy playing there. And you’re right, the last show that we played was the end of February 2020, so this will be more than two years since coming to Europe. We’re not doing ‘An Evening With’, so there’ll be an opening band playing with us that we’re working on. We’re gonna play a bunch of material from the new album, obviously. We do have a new stage set that’s in development that we’re trying to make an all-encompassing view from the top of the world, so we’ll see. So we’re working on that. And we’ll play some songs that we haven’t played in a long time – we always like to do that as well. It’ll just be fun to get back out there and perform, play live. Live music has been missing from all of our lives for way too long. So, we all need it. It’s a big part of what we do.

DY: Yeah, we are really looking for it. Dream Theater has influenced many prog metal bands in the new generation. But what amazes me more is that I think Dream Theater influenced a lot of older bands too. I remember Steve Harris of Iron Maiden mentioning Dream Theater in numerous interviews and saying that you influenced them – you and other bands influenced them to go more prog in 90s and in early 2000s. What do you feel about this, when you were just 25-26 you did Images And Words and you influenced the future of metal?

JP: That’s crazy, because, like you said, when you’re that age just trying to find yourself, find your voice and you put out music with your friends that you just all love to play, you have no idea. You can’t look into the future knowing that it’s gonna be something that would have that kind of impact, but it’s really interesting to us because back then, in the late 80s and early 90s, the whole prog metal scene that exists today wasn’t there. Obviously there was Iron Maiden and Metallica and Queensrÿche and stuff, but prog metal wasn’t even a term. People didn’t even call it that. We were just doing to us what felt natural, and it’s very humbling and very rewarding to be part of that family tree in the genre. Obviously bands have taken it to all different levels and are doing amazing stuff. It’s incredible for me to hear that the guys in Maiden said that, I think that’s wonderful. And of course the young bands – we meet a lot of them – that say that Dream Theater is an impact on them, I think it’s great. Like I said, I look at it as a big family tree of music and prog, and to be part of that in some ways is really cool.

DY: You were very productive in these two years. You released your solo album and you released Liquid Tension Experiment – the third album – and you both recorded these albums with Mike Portnoy; how was working with him, after years?

JP: It was great. It was really fun. When I went in to do my solo album, I had written all the music and recorded it all, programmed the drums and then I was like, “I need a drummer to actually record this”. I’m so happy that I asked Mike to do it ‘cause everybody was home because of the pandemic, and he doesn’t live too far from me in the US, so he was able to drive down. It was funny, because of the pandemic and everything, he couldn’t get drums really, so I just took the drum set from my house and brought that to the studio and he brought some pedals and things, and we ended up just keeping that set up and doing Liquid Tension on the same drum kit. So that’s my drum kit that he’s playing. [laughs] Having him in the studio when I did my solo album, playing on it, it just felt so cool. It felt like just reuniting with the classic combination, and I love the way he plays, I love his approach. And I think he made my solo album sound really lively. It sounds like we’re playing together – we weren’t – but it sounds really like [that]. Then doing Liquid Tension Experiment was a good opportunity to actually write together again and play and jam and do all that. And it was just a lot of fun. We were friends for a long, long time, so it was great to play music together again. For me, I always say this: “I have the best of both worlds because I have musical relationships with both Mike Mangini and Mike Portnoy, and I’m able to make all this great music.” And it’s a lot of fun.

DY: Yeah, it’s very great for us to see you together, to see that your friendship didn’t end, it’s very meaningful. My final question: this may be a personal curiosity, but I really wonder when will we hear the first Dream Theater album on digital platforms. I know there’s a legal issue, but what can you say about it, because I love that album too?

JP: Which one?

DY: When Dream And Day Unite.

JP: Are you saying it’s not available to stream? Is that what you mean?

DY: It’s nowhere.

JP: Ah, OK. I don’t know! I didn’t even think about that. Yeah. It’s interesting because that’s the one record for us that’s not in the same family of record companies, it’s like it was a separate one. And I know the masters were bought [by] some other company, so I don’t know. That’s a really good question. So it was only released on vinyl and CD.

DY: Yeah. It’s not in iTunes, not in Spotify.

JP: So it’s not streaming, but if you went to iTunes, could you download it or no?

DY: No.

JP: Interesting. You know what? I will bring this up with my manager. Thank you. It’s not on my mind, but now it’s on my mind.

DY: Can I ask little this or that questions? Steve Vai or Joe Satriani?

JP: Oh man, you can’t ask me that. Both!

DY: Iron Maiden or Metallica?

JP: Wow, these are these are crazy questions! Oh my God, these are these are all like my favorite musicians and bands and friends. I’m staying politically correct. I can’t make a decision.

DY: OK, Seinfeld or Friends?

JP: All right, that’s easy. Seinfeld. I’ll take that one.

DY: Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings?

JP: Star Wars.

DY: Images And Words or Scenes From A Memory?

JP: Scenes From A Memory.

DY: OK, thank you very much.

JP: Thank you. Nice talking to you and I hope to see you in Istanbul when we play there.