Dream Theater: James LaBrie chats to Martin Howell

Dream Theater are about to release their fifteenth studio album, ‘A View From The Top Of The World’, and it is a monster of an album. I had a chat with singer James LaBrie to discuss the album, the band’s new HQ, solo albums, and tours.

It’s always good news when Dream Theater release a new album, but their latest, ‘A View From The Top Of The World’ is even better than their usual excellent fare. It may only contain seven songs, but each one of them is fantastic. I asked singer James LaBrie if when making an album the band get an idea of how good it is going to be, or if they are too close to it to be objective. “I think when that hits you,” he began, “is when you sit back and listen to a song in its entirety; you start to get a sense of what works, of what direction to go. As a band we’ve never been shy. When we’re working, ideas just fly spontaneously around the room, but you have to be able to stand back and be objective. If we have something that isn’t right we’ll scrap it and move on, or sometimes we’ll be working on a song and part of it will morph into something else, and it doesn’t fit anymore, but you can create something new from that. It’s all the thrill of the ride. I remember at one point we were really jazzing and I had finished the vocal for the title track. John Petrucci was there and he came into the control room, and we listened to the whole thing from top to bottom and we started laughing. It was like holy s***, this sounds fricking amazing. We had a good vibe doing the album. We recorded it at our Dream Theater HQ, and that helped us stay focused, and it lifted all our spirits. We were doing this during the pandemic, and it was kind of precarious for all of us, so doing the album gave us a distraction from that. Everyone was feeling downtrodden, and recording really benefitted all of us.”

As James had said, the album was recorded during the pandemic, so I asked him if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, would they have recorded at this time. “Well, we were meant to be out touring ‘Distance Over Time’ until October 2020, which was when we went into the studio,” James replied. “Usually, after a tour we’ll take off for half a year, then regroup and start work, so around now we should have been in the mixing stage and doing artwork, and the album would have been out May or June 2022, which is actually when my solo album will be out.” I couldn’t ignore a comment like that, so I asked James for more details. “I’ve been doing an album with a guy named Paul Logue [best known as the bass player for Eden’s Curse]. He’s someone I’ve known for over a decade and we’d talked about doing an album but never had the chance to do it,” James explained. “It was originally an acoustic album although it gradually morphed, but still has that acoustic element. It came out amazing.”

Getting back to the pandemic, I asked how it had affected the band, as they were in the middle of a tour. “This is the strange part,” answered James. “The last show we did was February 23rd in Glasgow. The next day I was at the airport – we were taking a break before heading to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand – and I bumped into Paul at the airport. He had been at the show the night before but he didn’t have my new email address. He said he’d been trying to contact me, and said ‘let me know if you want to start writing.’ I said, ‘I’m meant to be on tour till October, but there’s all this virus stuff kicking off, and if everything shuts down like people are talking about, let’s do it. Two weeks later everything shut down, so we got it done finally. Then I was in Canada, the rest of Dream Theater were in New York, and travel from Canada to the States was a near impossibility, so I couldn’t join the guys in the studio. I was pumped in via Zoom on to a big TV monitor, they were pumped into my basement studio, and all their instruments were through the studio speakers; it worked really well. In some ways it was no different to me sitting there in the studio in headphones. In fact it had some cool advantages, cos I could mute them. Normally when we’re all in the studio, if I have an idea I have to run out, sing it down and come back in. You can’t just stop everyone in mid flow, so you have to wait and then say ‘hey, I had this idea. What do you think?’ This way I could do it on the fly. It was a very productive way of working. The important thing was for those four guys to be together for that immediate connection, have the ideas fly, with that constant back and forth.” James had mentioned Dream Theater HQ, and I had to say that it conjured up visions of something like the Avengers HQ from the Marvel movies. “You’re not far off,” he laughed. “We renovated a warehouse and put in a studio, space for all our gear, living space, tech room, a board room for when we need to have meetings; it’s a great place. We actually had it before the ‘Distance Over Time’ tour. We rehearsed there, and then John did his solo album there and the Liquid Tension Experiment album, This was the first Dream Theater album recorded there and it helped a lot. We didn’t have to go anywhere and only the people who needed to be there were there.” I asked James if this facility was something they let out to other bands. “I think we’ll be having that discussion,” he answered. “We need to discuss whether or not that is something we want to do. I don’t think there’s any doubt that bands would be interested in using it.”

When the band were on tour in those pre-pandemic days, they were celebrating the anniversary of the classic ‘Scenes From A Memory’ album, playing it in its entirety. Listening to ‘A View From The Top Of The World’, there are moments where there are definite stylistic similarities. I asked James if playing ‘Scenes’ every night may have influenced the song writing. “Going out and doing an album every night,” he began, “it seeps in. And when you listen to a song like ‘Home’ or ‘Strange Déjà Vu’, or ‘A Change Of Seasons’, and you really listen to what we did, you know it’s cool to sit down and listen to what we did so well. Those are our roots and it rekindles that, and there’s no doubt that it probably did come through in the new album.”

Mention of ‘A Change Of Seasons’ brought the conversation around to epics, and the twenty-minute title track on the new album. I asked if it had always been intended to be an epic, or if it had developed over time. “Well, I have to tell you, we knew before we wrote the first note that we were going to do an epic on this album,” James answered. “We hadn’t done one since ‘Illumination Theory’, and they are a big part of what we do, so it made sense. When you approach a song like this, it has many layers, like chapters in a book, or instalments in movies, passages that move you emotionally in different ways. It’s something we’re always very focused on, how to build the song, different sections, interweaving instrumental passages. It’s fun to listen back to a song like that. I remember doing that and it didn’t seem like we’d been listening to it for twenty minutes; we took that as a good sign.” Carrying on with song writing, I asked James what he drew on for inspiration when it came to lyrics. “It can vary. Sometimes I write from literature, other times it might be something I’ve seen or heard,” he told me. “I wrote ‘Answering The Call’ after watching a documentary about Saudi Arabia, and while the song isn’t about Saudi Arabia specifically, it deals with the kind of social repression found there, that kind of autonomous, almost tyrannical regime. It’s about asking when we are going to come together, answer the call, shed the hatred and achieve equality for all. I’m not saying that countries like Canada, America or the UK don’t have problems too, but generally those problems don’t leave you fearing for your life. And then I wrote ‘The Alien’ after a podcast where Elon Musk was talking about terraforming, and I started thinking about if, or when, we go out into the Universe and meet other lifeforms, we’ll be the aliens.” I had to asked at this point if James believed in extra-terrestrial life. “I think it’s foolhardy to think we are the only life. I mean, how many galaxies are there, and solar systems? Are we the only ones? No way. It’s a lot scarier to think we are alone.”

Back on Earth, the band have some dates booked, with the UK set for April 2022. I asked what the band would be doing this time around. We’re going to be doing a two hour show, so we’ll have an opening band,” said James. “Obviously we’ll be doing songs from the new album and some classics that we maybe haven’t for a while. People have been asking about the twentieth anniversary of ‘Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence’ and the thirtieth anniversary of ‘Images And Words’, but no; I mean, we just did a world tour where we honoured one album, and if we keep doing that, it pulls us away from the rest of our discography.” There have been items in the news recently about making touring greener, more environmentally friendly, so I asked if this was something that the band took into consideration. “It’s not something we’ve gone into in great depth,” James mused, “but things are changing, and things have to change. I remember on the last tour, going into a venue and seeing all the bottles of water. I mean, I drink bottled water on stage, I’m part of the problem in that respect. I remember talking to our tour manager and saying to him, ‘how many more years will this be a reality?’ and he said ‘three to five years’, and he’s right, we need to back off from the use of plastic. All the things we take for granted, it’s going to have to change.”

Going back to the subject of anniversaries, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of James joining the band. I asked if he remembered the first time he met the rest of the guys. “Absolutely,” he replied. “I flew into LaGuardia and was met by Mike Portnoy and John Myung, and we got into Mike’s van. John had been working all night, so he was crashed out in the back. Mike was living with his brother, so I stayed at John’s place. The next day I met the rest of the guys and we rehearsed and jammed; we played a lot off ‘When Dream And Day Unite’ and I think we did ‘Take The Time’ and ‘Learning To Live’, and I think we also did ‘A Change Of Seasons’. After that we went to a diner, and I got to know everyone. Then on October 14th 1991 we went into BearTracks Studios with David [Prater, producer] and Doug [Oberkircher, engineer]. We were all young and excited, all gung-ho, and none of us knew how it would take. At that time Nirvana and grunge were exploding, there were still some hair bands too, and what we were doing was completely different from everything else, which was probably a blessing. Then ‘Pull Me Under’ was a huge hit and gave us our elongated career. It blows my mind to still be here talking about it all these years later.”

And let’s face it, it’s still a mind-blowing album to listen to all these years later, too. The new Dream Theater album, ‘A View From The Top Of The World’, is essential listening for any prog metal fan. It is out now on InsideOut Music.