Jordan Rudess interview

Jordan Rudess: How’s it going?

Doug Helvering: Greetings!

JR: Greetings to you! What’s up?

DH: Not much. Trying to keep up, have a good old time and all that sort of stuff. Where are you in the world?

JR: I’m at home right now. I’m sitting in my streaming room with my old modular in back of me that you can see.

DH: Awesome!

JR: Kind of fun, but yeah this is my room. I’ve got a nine foot Steinway in the middle of the room, which is always nice to have in the middle of a room. There’s synthesizers all along the wall. Some new acoustic panels over on the side, and some more things in the back.

DH: That’s fun

JR: Yeah, one of my crazy spaces. Actually the other space that I have, which is smaller is outside. I have to actually walk outside my house and get to [it]. Kind of like the man cave and that’s where an album like Wired For Madness which I guess we’ll talk about a little bit...

DH: We shall. Well thanks for taking time out of your day. Today is October 22nd – I can’t believe I’m talking to you on the drop day!

JR: Unbelievable! I mean I’m happy to talk to you. It’s an exciting day!

DH: This worked out. Were you guys supposed to be on a tour stop today originally or was that not started yet?

JR: We were supposed to have our first show on October 25th, so we would have started the two or three days later and I just found out that our album is number one on rock and metal on the iTunes charts. I’m not sure if you’ve ever really had that in rock. Metal maybe, but not rock.

DH: Congratulations! So I read that this one was the first of y’all’s albums that you recorded at your own studio. What benefits and maybe detriments are there to recording in your own space?

JR: It was pretty cool, actually. Mostly benefits I’d say. We have our own space, which we decided on having a couple years back, because we found that our world was kind of spread out a little bit: recording here, having gear stored over there. Dream Theater is kind of a band that has a lot of equipment and let’s just put it all in one spot, and it just made sense from everybody’s point of view to do that. So we found a place and thanks to our ace techs as they say, they could go into a kind of a big open space and put up some walls and make moves out of it so we were able to actually form a very nice live room where we could all set up our gear and record. And then we have a control room where the engineer sits. We’ll just get some work done without anybody looking over our shoulders.

DH: Was most of the tracking done live or did you guys lay down separate tracks? What was the process like?

JR: The way that it works is we’re all in the room together, we’re writing the stuff, we’re hashing it out. We’re composing the music and people playing loud parts, and kind of develop this skill – which maybe you would appreciate – which is that as John Petrucci is like [imitates guitar part] the one part we’re working on, I’m composing the next part, believe it or not, with all this other sound in my head. But because we’re in the room and we’re kind of bouncing off of each other and one idea leads to the other, then we lay down sections as we come up with them, trying to kind of put together the parts that’ll make up the song. So it’s not unusual for us to come up with let’s say a verse section and just lay it down, and then we try to get it down enough that we have a start to build a structure. But then everybody goes back later on, and for the most part we do our parts again. I’ll use a sound that works for the section generally. “Oh this section should have a string sound.” I don’t spend all my time crafting the perfect string sound, but I have one quickly in front of me that will work for the compositional process, and later on I’ll go “you know what? I really want to have a little bit more attack on the strings and maybe it should be a little brighter,” and it should be this or that. I’ll layer it with this library or that, and then that’s the next phase of it all.

DH: So it’s like the band kind of cultivates as a group these little building blocks that become pieces and you’re like “let’s do that again” and that becomes a verse or that becomes a bridge that sort of thing.

JR: Exactly and one part leads to the other. I mean literally John will come up with an idea and play some chords, and next thing we got a verse and then I go “you know what? Well I got this thing that could happen next.” And everybody goes “that’s cool!” Then we work on that. And then after a few sections, we go “well okay, so we got a verse, we got a chorus. Maybe we need to have an instrumental section now.” Then we set out on that path and we work on that and play around

DH: So I assume that this was done during COVID times, right? During lockdown. When did you guys go into the studio? How long did the album take?

JR: Oh we were in the studio like about a year ago, I guess it was. We actually went in there after we had done the Liquid Tension Experiment stuff – the LTE3 album. That was first I did at Dream Theater headquarters actually. And then after that, we coordinated ourselves, which was not easy, because the whole COVID thing makes it difficult for anything and everything these days. So we did figure out how to get together and to feel comfortable doing it. Finally got together and we recorded, and you know generally we’ll take... I don’t know... a couple months of hashing stuff around, writing, and then people start taking turns and tracking and doing all that.

DH: Wonderful stuff! So I have heard some of the new album, but not all of it. I have included Alien on my channel; that was the first single that came out. I really enjoyed it. Do you have a personal favorite on the new album?

JR: You know I guess I kind of point to the title track, the epic track, the long one. Because as much as I like shorter form things, I guess the classical musician in me likes music where you develop motifs and you do different techniques, build things. And you take your time and all the different elements that go into making the music really interesting instead of having it be a concise song, which is cool too, but I like to have something that’s going on in the melody, then maybe try it putting in the bass and changing the chords and doing all the different steps.

DH: Awesome! I’m saving that epic track for a future reaction on my channel, so I haven’t quite listened to it yet. I’ve got a lot of folks that are a big Dream Theater fans on my Patreon and they’re like “are we gonna do a big pow-wow listen?” I’m like “just give me a little bit of time.” You showed me a little bit of your setup, your gear. I am curious about this I bought the keyboard that I still use in my own studio like over a decade ago. So when you go on stage, what’s your gear set up like? What all toys do you have?

JR: My setup on stage is very different than the setup that I use for recording. When I’m recording – like this last album – I use a lot of software, a lot of virtual instruments, because we’ve gotten to a point now where the virtual instruments are incredible.

DH: They sound great.

JR: All the orchestral libraries and things like that. I mean it’s just amazing what you can do with software. But I also enjoy having some hardware around me, different keyboards. Actually one of the instruments that I brought to the Dream Theater sessions was my 1973 vintage Minimoog! I got brave and I said “you know what? All right, I’ll throw it in the car. If something happens to it, my head tech is there. He could probably fix it.” So I was really debating whether or not I wanted to bring the precious Minimoog, which is really the instrument that started it all out for me. And of course my staple – the Korg Kronos – which is the instrument that I use live and do 90% of what I do on is being part of the sessions. Through the years I’ve got a tremendous library of cool sounds – everything from orchestral sounds on there to all the different keyboard sounds to really heavy sounds that go well with the guitar.

DH: I’m curious about that. So I know where to get some of these really nice orchestral patches and sounds that you can use when you recreate and play things. But do you have the ability to create your own sort of sound bank that you can use and sample and start using it with your instrument in the band?

JR: Not totally sure I’m clear on your question.

DH: Can you go in to create a specific synth sound or a string sound and dial in the EQ so that you can then apply it towards playing a solo?

JR: Yeah, absolutely. I can do that. I’m somebody who is comfortable with synthesizers and samplers. I can do whatever editing or change things as I like. But these days, like starting points, there’s incredible orchestral libraries where I can call up a magnificent violin section sound or cellos or trombones or whatever. And sometimes some of the orchestrators that I’ve worked with in my albums, they’ll say “forget about using the orchestra. Just play that!” The reason is because first of all they use the very best microphones in the world to do these samples. They’ll do things like my friends at 8dio – a company that puts out great sound collections – they’ll get 66 trombone players in a room or 66 cellists or 66 tubists, put them all in a room and they’ll say “okay play a G” and it sounds incredible. So you’ll hear on the title track to the new Dream Theater album I use the 66 trombone sound. It’s like [imitates blasting trombone sounds]. It’s really cool sounding and then I’ll use other libraries just to maybe make it bigger. Of course I’ve gotta be heard through a guitar that’s as big as your house.

DH: Yeah, you gotta compete with John sometimes.

JR: For some of the sounds got to be pretty mighty. In reality they have to have their own particular space in the sonic mix. But it’s nice to have a huge keyboard sound. So a lot of it’s about layering and doing things like “oh I’ll use the 66 trombones and then if I use the heaviosity epic horns they sound amazing together. And then maybe I’ll go to my Korg synthesizer and dial in the harmonics or the filter a little bit just to exaggerate something that’s in there to just make it surreal. I’m not that into necessarily trying to reproduce the exact acoustic sound of an orchestra. Because I’m a synthesist, I’m more thinking about what’s the sound I want and if it’s somewhere between like a synthesizer sound or an orchestral sound or something exaggerated or whatever molding or shaping of the sound – it’s all fair game.

DH: Fascinating. So reading up on you a bit, how does a nine-year-old get invited to go to Juilliard?

JR: My first teacher was one of these guys who comes around the house for 30 minutes at a time and he was a jazz guy, and he brought the little red book with him to teach me the notes. But then he quickly realized that I was more interested in playing chords and stuff because I just kind of had a knack for playing chords. “Forget about the book – let me write down like C-F-G and just show you what it is,” and he made me like a circle of fifths kind of thing. Then I started to mess around with those chords and have some fun, and I was just playing songs on my own. The teacher started to come for free, he was having a good time with me. I was kind of playing. So my mother thought that was wonderful and one day some friends of my parents came by and heard me playing and said “wow, he’s very talented. You should really take him to a serious teacher.” They happened to know somebody – her name was Magda. She was a Hungarian woman, very passionate, temperamental. Her story very briefly was that her son, whose name was Bruce Steeg, had gone to Juilliard pre-college and then the college, but he dropped out before he graduated the college to join Guy Lombardo’s band. So Magda never recovered. When Magda met me as an eight-year-old, then she thought “you’re going to be the one to stay. I’m going to get you into Juilliard and you’ll be the one to stay there.” So a year of intensive training with Magda, who was giving me little not-so-gentle kicks if I hit the wrong note or played my scales incorrectly. And she got me ready and I had the program of Bach and Beethoven and Debussy and what Aaron Copeland thing and I played it at nine years old for my Juilliard pre-college audition. Then I started with my teacher Kathryn Parker, who was a student of Rosina Levine, who was probably one of the most famous piano teachers of the last 150 years. So I had this really great training. The first thing my teacher Miss Parker said to me was... because I was playing a little C major prelude, I could play harder stuff, but she wanted me to go back. She was like “whatever you learned is wrong; you’re playing this.” So I brought it in and I started to improvise a little bit with it and you know just do my thing. She was like “you can’t do that. We’re not we’re not doing improvisation here – that’s not what this is about. You have to play what’s on the page.” So I thought “well okay...” So then I would take my improvisations to a practice room way down the hallway and maybe drag some little friends in there and play boogie woogie and blues and laugh and smile and come out and straighten up a little bit and go back to our classical training. That’s how it all started, and Magda... I guess in some ways it was a good thing that she was not alive anymore, because I left entered the Juilliard college as well when I was 18 but left when I was 19 because I was already on to other things and had enough.

DH: So you enrolled in Juilliard and you’ve got the skills to have gone through the degree program, but uh you were being called other places.

JR: I was being called. When I was 18 and I was trying to decide what I wanted to do for college, my teachers my parents were all “well you spent this long doing this you should go to the college.” But of course at Juilliard, they don’t just take you because you’ve been going there for nine years already. You got to re-audition. The preparatory school’s one thing, the college is another. So I auditioned and I got in with this woman whose name was Adele Marcus who was a very famous piano teacher. She said to my parents “your son is going to emerge early on the New York concert piano scene” and blah blah blah. Actually you might appreciate this story, which is that I walked in there one day for a lesson – about a happy year of studying with her – playing the Chopin G minor ballad. I learned it in about a week and I could I could play it after a week, which was I thought was pretty cool. So I came in and I’m playing the piece for her. I got about halfway, she came she took the book away and I stopped. She said “well why did you stop?” I said “I stopped because I don’t know it by memory – I’ve only been playing it for one week.” She said “well, when you study with Adele Marcus, you have to memorize everything the first week.” I went “oh really” and I thought about Genesis and Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes and Gentle Giant and King Crimson and my Moog synthesizer, and I basically said to her “you know what? I’m done. I gotta go.”

DH: And you still use notation on tour.

JR: Yeah and I’m the one in the band that always has a piece of music paper and a pencil. I sit at my piano and I write etudes still and I love seeing things. Yeah, I’m a big improviser sure, but I also love the art form of figuring things out and having it be in front of me in manuscript paper.

DH: I’m going to switch gears... When you go to compose then – since we talked about that – are you using a pen and paper or are you at your keyboard recording an improv session? Take us through a bit of your creative process.

JR: These are really interesting things to talk about. I compose music in a lot of different ways and I enjoy doing it different ways. One is, as I said, I’m an improviser so a lot of ideas come from something that I just feel. I’ll sit down and go [motions to playing] especially if you’re feeling a particular emotion. Somehow my hands can just land on something that might be a little more special than otherwise. If I’m in the writing zone, I’ll try recording some of that into my into my Logic session – Logic is the DAW that I use. I’ll capture it that way. What’s interesting is that especially when I’m working on my own music like Wired For Madness or something like that, I’ll capture it and then when I go to orchestrate it, I open up the window that shows me the notation of what I just played, because it’s not like I can necessarily even remember all the details of what I did. I might just place it go like this [imitates playing keyboard]. “Oh that was cool! Well let’s see it back. Now wait... okay I can see what the bass line is so I can invent or follow my bass line. I can add my string line while I’m looking at it, maybe something that’s not there that I want to add I can add. I use the notation very much in that case. But I can also write a lot of times... let’s go to like a Dream Theater thing where I’m sitting there with a piece of music paper on my lap and I’ll be like “you know what guys? This would be a really cool part to have be contrapuntal and I really need a few minutes to just to write this out.” So everybody gets a cup of coffee and I write out what John Petrucci just played and I sit there with the music paper and I’m looking at it and I can line things up like you can really only do when you’re in that mode.

DH: For sure. When I’m writing, a lot of times I’ll do the same thing. I’ll sit and I’ll be improvising at the piano and I’ll come up with “oh that was a great sound! Where are my hands? What did I just do right?” But writing a contrapuntal melody if you’re used to looking at a lot of notation of sheet music, just the shapes of the lines, you just get used to it and you’re like “if I have an arc that looks like that, then I need a companion to it” and you start just sort of filling in the shapes and using your skills to make sure that the notes are right.

JR: Right. One of the things that I like to do and that I maybe even pride myself in doing is to be able to do like a counter point improvisation, right? But it’s going to be different if I stop the action and slow it down and write it and look at it. It’s going to be different than if it’s something that I just play off the top of my head. It’s a different headspace and I really like that space, and I find that I can come up with different things. The other times that I’ll just go more with pencil and paper is if I’m doing something that’s harmonically very dense and rich where I really want to take the time to consider “okay I played this and now let’s see... I want this voice to maybe move there. That’s cool… No, I like that. Okay I’ll move this here. Okay yeah write it down... Ah! That’s what I wanted!”

DH: That’s part of the process that I really enjoy. During this time everything’s kind of a house of cards and anything can be shuffled or anything can be moved and it affects everything else. It’s such a unique part of the creating process. We’ve talked though a little bit about Wired For Madness, so I wanted to ask you about this. This is your solo album. I believe that came out a couple years ago. I read that while it’s not a concept album, the title track does have a story behind it. Would you be willing to let us know what was behind the inspiration for that?

JR: It’s interesting because I’m primarily a creative person that operates in the musical and sometimes even the visual domain, but I don’t so much... I mean and I’ve written lyrics certainly throughout my career – not with Dream Theater – but it’s not my first real concern. I could very much be satisfied with doing an instrumental piece of music; it doesn’t necessarily need to have vocals on it, but when I was thinking about doing this Wired For Madness album, what I realized through the years is that there’s a lot of people who love music and they can they just listen to music and it’s all wonderful, but there’s even more people that can allow themselves to get into a piece of music if it has something like a story behind it, or if it has a lyrics. I might not care; I only notice the lyrics when somebody says something – that the syllables don’t fit with the sound. I’m very sensitive to awkward words and music. All of a sudden I’ll go “wait! That just interrupted my flow! Just give me something with the words are with the phrase and they sound good.” But most people I think are really interested and have an easier time getting into music when there is a story concept or a lyrical meaning behind it. So I thought “well, that’s cool. Let me find something that turns me on, that’s an interesting kind of an idea that I can craft this big piece around. So I did and I actually have a really good friend who’s so supportive of me and helps me think about titles of albums and things like that. And we were bouncing around some ideas and came up with this whole idea Wired For Madness. The general story is that we’re kind of looking ahead in the future just a little bit because what’s happening now is ridiculously crazy in the science world but like it’s about a character who actually goes in for a special kind of a procedure where he feels like his faculties – his mental, his physical faculties – are not what they could be. So he signs up for this procedure where they actually can increase his abilities to be able to have an incredible memory and to process data and to expand his consciousness to an incredibly high degree, his physical body. The song is really about what happens like the procedure and what happens within that context, and how it all ends up where you don’t know if he killed himself because it just got too intense and brain exploded, or if he reaches a higher level, like ascends to wherever you go when you leave this plane. I enjoyed that story so it’s fun writing some words and just having fun with that and thinking that this is an extension of the music.

DH: That was basically recorded there at your estate?

JR: Mmm hmm. I recorded almost everything here. The drums which Rod Morgenstein played and Marco Minnemann were recorded at different places, and the vocals that are on there are recorded in other places as well. But really there’s so much of it that’s just me and my stuff – playing software, all this stuff – and that was done in my man cave which is my other space.

DH: Very cool. I’ve got just a couple more short questions for you. I let some of my patrons know that I was going to be talking to you and they said ‘oh we have questions!’ One of my patrons said that that he consistently returns to An Evening With John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess – the concert back in 2004 – and he was curious how that particular concert came about, and if you and John have talked about doing another concert like that with a newer repertoire.

JR: That album that concert is something that is brought up almost every day of my life. It’s almost like another Liquid Tension kind of thing where people are asking for it. They want it, they want it, ‘please do another one of these!’ It was really enjoyable because in a sense it was kind of like an LTE thing where John and I got together, we put together some riffs – you know main riffs – and then almost like a jazz group where they say ‘okay this is the head of the song, and now we’re gonna improvise for a while and then we’re gonna go back to the head and that’s it. We had a lot of fun with that. We were basically putting this together for one concert event that we decided to do and then we also decided to record it so it all kind of came out of that. You know every now and then I ping John Petrucci about it. ‘John we should really do another evening with John and Jordan, and he says ‘yeah, yeah, we should do that’, and then of course we start making a Dream Theater record, we start making an LTE record, I’m off doing Wired For Madness, he’s here and there, and hopefully one of these days we can return to that.

DH: I really enjoyed the LTE album that came out. I reacted to the Gershwin tune on that one and that features a lot of your orchestral sounds there on the keyboard. It’s a great, great track! You guys just rip that one up!

JR: I’m so glad to hear that! That’s probably my favorite track. I of course love so much about the album, but that one was a real party for me. After we were together and we kind of hashed out the structure of things, I sat in my studio with all my sonic tools and went crazy with it. I was like “okay a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and now a little honky tonk thing, a little steel drum, some more violins, some of this sound, of that sound.” When I was done with it, I was like “okay this was a really good project. This was cool – really fun.

DH: It’s kind of fun to go into the sandbox and just play with toys for a while, isn’t it? On my particular channel or my site, I’ve got a bunch of people who are classic prog fans and I’ve got a bunch of people who are modern prog fans, and I am attempting to get them to talk uh to each other congenially – and we’re doing pretty well so far – but I have some classic uh prog fans who really don’t know much of the repertoire from some of these newer bands including – and I know that it’s the 15th album – but including Dream Theater. So where would you suggest that some of these more classic prog fans – and I know you’re a fan of the classic ‘70s giants – where would you suggest that they start with Dream Theater specifically, like one of your albums or other bands that you think that might be an interesting entry point?

JR: You know one of the most popular Dream Theater albums is Scenes From A Memory, which is the first one that I did back in 1999, and that’s a real favorite of so many people. I would say if it’s a kind of fan that you know they’re a Genesis/Yes kind of snob and they’re not into metal at all, there’s a couple ways I would probably steer them. One way is – you might have even heard this album – our Octavarium album. I think that that’s very proggy, it has a lot of that kind of sensibility to it. It’s not that metal, although everything Dream Theater does it has a little bit of a metal flavor – you can’t quite take that out of the team here. But Octavarium is definitely one of the more classic proggy type albums. Also the second album I did with Dream Theater, which is called Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence. In those days everybody was listening to CDs, and the second CD – it was a double CD thing – the second CD, like side two is one of my favorites. It’s really very keyboard driven, just harmonically, the way the chords are laid out. I think that would probably be something that the classic prog people would really like. And then as far as like other music that they might be turned on to... of course more current artist that’s also done some music that you could say is more classic in nature [is] Steven Wilson’s music. Porcupine Tree is a group that I think appeals to a lot of the folks that might not be able to digest some of the more heavy prog metal stuff.

DH: Wonderful! I really do thank you for taking the time to be here and it’s good news that the new album is selling well and everybody’s reacting well to it. Let me ask you this: I think I’m going to uh to react to another piece on the album as sort of a companion to this interview. I’m also gonna look at your title track Wired For Madness in the coming week, but I think I’m going to dive into the epic, to the title track.

JR: Wow! Fasten your seat belt!

DH: I’m going to eat my Wheaties that day and give it my best shot.

JR: That’s awesome. I don’t know if you know this, but I have a company called Wizdom Music, and I’ve had it for some years now and we do cutting edge musical applications like instruments, but a lot of them will run like on an iOS device. I can run it on my iPad as an example. So one of my most popular apps is called Geoshred, and Geoshred is an application that is based on a technology called physical modeling. There’s a lot of ways to make sound with synthesizers: you can have sampling, you can do certain div synthesis like a Moog synthesizer, but there’s also physical modeling which is not sampling at all. It’s all done with advanced mathematics, and what they do is they go in and mathematically or scientifically calculate – like if you’re looking at a string or a guitar – they’ll look at the size of the string, they’ll look at the body of the guitar, how big the body is, what kind of wood it’s using, and they’ll have mathematic formulas that create the sound of this instrument. Then what ends up happening is that the instrument becomes very organic, because it’s not like switching between recorded sounds like a sampler, it’s literally – you pluck harder on a string or softer – it’s changing the numbers with this very real effect. My partner, whose name is Julius Smith, was one of the inventors of physical modeling. He’s out of Stanford University, and we have our instrument which now has some new models that we put in there. And as I was getting to, the middle of the title track, you’re going to hear a very beautiful cello type sound, and I’m playing it on my iPad. It just comes down to me playing on the iPad cello and John Petrucci playing a very nice clean electric guitar sound, like a duet, and then it kind of builds from there. But when you hear it, think of me with my finger on the iPad playing this cello sound.

DH: So what’s the interface like? Are you just moving your finger around?

JR: I’m looking to see if I have my iPad – you got a minute? I’ll show it to you.

DH: Sure.

[JR gives DH a demonstration]

DH: It’s amazing what we can do now! Can you imagine what Keith Emerson could have done with an instrument like that?

JR: Right? It’s funny because I partnered with this guy who invented physical modeling. What I can do on the iPad is as advanced as anything out there right now, as far as being able to control a solo instrument like that. I mean it’s crazy. I’ll play one more.

[JR gives DH another demonstration]

DH: That’s insane! I love it! The thing that strikes me as so unique and important about your work and about Dream Theater’s work [is] you guys are like visionaries and just sort of seek the next thing, the next step. “What can we build on?” And you’re imagining something that’s outside of where you’re always seeming to try to push the envelope forward. In doing so, we come up with these wonderful new abilities to make music and to experience music, and I’m very thankful for the dedication even after all these years that you guys put in and the hard work y’all put in.

JR: One of the things that struck me even before I was in Dream Theater – I’ve been there for 22 years, but they existed before me – I don’t know if you know. But when I first heard them, somebody brought over a Dream Theater record – I think was Images And Words – and I heard them play and I was like “Wow! Okay, so they got the prog thing going on, they got the metal thing going on,” and I knew about that style, both of these individually, but to hear them put together was pretty cool. But what really got me interested is when I heard them play, I was like “I’m not used to hearing that kind of virtuoso playing in the rock context. Who else is out there that can play the finest technical –

DH: – that cleanly. It’s unbelievable. It really is.

JR: You don’t really find that in the rock world and you don’t really find it in the jazz world. You find it in the classical world where people have the structure and they learn technique as you know. But I was blown away. I was like “this is incredible!” and that led to my interest in even joining them. I found out in hanging out with them, while I was practicing my piano five hours a day they were in their basement – the two Johns: John Myung the bass player and John Petrucci – and they were drilling on Metallica and Iron Maiden stuff and Rush stuff. They had a pact actually that they wouldn’t show up at a party at night unless they put in their six hours. So if one of them would go out and they’d see each other like “did you do your six hours of practice today?”

DH: You can’t eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat! [laughs]

JR: It was really incredible to see that work ethic. So I think it’s a culture; Dream Theater is kind of like this unusual kind of work ethic for a rock band. Plus a little bit of the spirit of invention. John has his own guitars that he puts out and I have my own musical cutting edge stuff that I’m into with technology. It is an interesting, unusual bunch of guys that have managed to come together.

DH: Fun. Well when the tour gets around to Philadelphia, I have my ticket and I am so excited to be coming to my first ever Dream Theater concert. I have a buddy of mine who has played me some of your recordings before, and we would always listen to it in the car on long trips and I’m like “oh cool!” But you got to get out of the car where you’re moving around, so you can concentrate and really listen and experience all that you guys put out. It’s wonderful work and I do thank you on behalf of all of our fans for your work and for the work of the band and can’t wait to dive into the album and take a look at some of your solo work as well. Besides Wired For Madness, I’m sure you have other solo stuff that’s –

JR: Yeah! You might enjoy – well you’ll see how you feel about Wired For Madness – but the other ones that are in the kind of prog rocks a little bit of electronic vein are Rhythm Of Time and Feeding The Wheel. Those are in the spirit of Wired For Madness – very proggy, very Jordany. There’s also – which your people who like classic prog might really like – my album called The Road Home, and I say that because The Road Home features my favorite classic prog that I reimagined in the studio. Like I did a version of Tarkus. I don’t know if you know Emerson Lake & Palmer –

DH: I do!

JR: – but you might really enjoy hearing my version of Tarkus. That I’d love for you to do a listening session.

DH: I would love that. I’ve reviewed Tarkus on my channel and it’s –

JR: You gotta do my version!

DH: It’s one of my favorites! You’re on! I will take a look! Thanks for your time Jordan. I really do appreciate it. Good luck with the new album A View From The Top Of The World, Dream Theater, and more solo work by Jordan Rudess. Thank you very much for spending time with us today.

JR: Thanks Doug, it’s a pleasure.