Mike Portnoy interview (excerpts)

Brandon Toews: I guess we should just start with the breaking news: you’re back in Dream Theater. How did that all happen? What’s the story? I remember Jordan Rudess was out, I think about two weeks before the time of filming this, and he didn’t say it outright, but we were just talking about some of the past few Dream Theater records and like, “I’m curious what the next era of Dream Theater is going to be like,” ‘cause the last few albums have been different.

Mike Portnoy: He was probably like exploding inside.

BT: Exactly, and all he told me was “Well get ready for the next era!” Like, what does he mean? And then here you are, so how did that all happen?

MP: It’s been 13 years and I think time heals all wounds, as the expression goes. It’s been many, many years now of rekindling my relationships with the guys, starting with John Petrucci. Maybe five, six, seven years ago or so, we just reconnected. His wife and my wife were in a band together even before we knew our wives. Our kids have grown up together. My daughter and John Petrucci’s daughter shared an apartment together in New York for the last 5 years. So the families were still close, so John and I inevitably reconnected on a personal level. I guess it really started to gain some traction during COVID lockdown because I couldn’t tour and Dream Theater couldn’t tour, so John decided he wanted to do a solo album and he asked me to play on it. So that was the first step, I guess, in this direction. So I played on John’s solo album. And then a few months later, we did an LTE album with John and Jordan, so that brought three of us back together. And then the following year, I ended up doing John’s solo tour and our wives’ band were opening for us, so we had the wives out with us.

So it just seemed like it was all starting to come together on a personal level and then the musical level as well. I think the final piece was me reconnecting with James LaBrie, because James and I hadn’t spoken in over a decade. I went to see Dream Theater play in New York, I guess around 2022, and that was my first time seeing James in over a decade. And literally – I’m not exaggerating – within five seconds of seeing each other it was hugs, kisses and it was like any of the drama and bulls*** that happened during all of those years of the split, it just melted away immediately. With James and I buddying up again, it kind of just began to seem like an inevitability. It wasn’t ever in either of our plans to eventually reunite. In fact, if you would’ve asked me this five years ago, I probably wouldn’t have put money on it. But with the developments of everything I just laid out for you, then it started to really feel like, well, maybe this is inevitable. It just seems like we’re in the right place and the right time at this stage of our lives. All those years of Dream Theater, we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s. And here we are, most of us in our 50s and some of the members in their 60s, and it just seems like life is too short to not be with the people you love and play the music that is part of your life and your heart and soul. So yeah, here we are.

BT: I think we’d all commend you, the band, Mike Mangini [on] the way the whole band went about the news, and the transition was just done with the highest amount of class. I mean how many examples are there of bands just blowing up and this member saying whatever? Mike’s statement, your statement, and the way it was all handled was just topnotch.

MP: I agree. It was nice to see something like this happen with taking the high road and class and grace and dignity, and not a war of words and drama and BS. This was really handled so well, and I have to give Mike Mangini all the credit in the world for that, because it’s not easy being replaced. I can’t imagine. He handled it really well, and the things he said were so classy. So I was really glad to see how well he took it. ‘Cause I was a little concerned about that. But it couldn’t have come off any better.

BT: I think you and Mangini posted a photo at a Dream Theater show, and I just remember seeing the comments, everyone’s so stoked that you guys got along and it looked like you guys were both stoked for each other.

MP: Well, I was friends with him before he knew any of the guys in Dream Theater. He and I were friends in the ‘90s when he was still playing in Extreme and stuff like that, and we would do clinics together. He’s an old friend. And I could never get mad at the guy for taking the gig. I mean, how could you not? It was a great opportunity and a great gig, so it was nice when all those resentments and all that stuff melted away, because it was a tough couple of years in the start of the split.

BT: You were talking earlier this week about your role in the band years ago – you would make the setlists, you were doing merch, bunch of other stuff. Do you think that’s going to be a challenge coming back where [there are] new ways of doing things or duties have been reassigned to different people and it’s probably going to be a learning curve?

MP: Absolutely. I think that was the one discussion that John Petrucci and I had. We still to this point haven’t talked about business or money or finances or any of that. It was all about, “OK, we know we love each other, we know we want to play together again, but what is the new dynamic gonna be?” Because for all those first 25 years, John and I produced the albums together, we led the band together. I was handling the bulk of the responsibilities and decision-making and things like that, so when I left the band, I was very much a control freak. And now [in] the last 13 years or so, obviously they’ve had to redesign their inner structure and how they function and how they work – I think John produces the albums himself now – so it remains to be seen how the “new old” Dream Theater will function. But I think we’re all older and wiser. When I left the band 13 years ago, I was a control freak – absolutely. I’ll be the first to admit it. And I think as time has gone on, I’ve loosened up on all that. [For] all the bands I’ve done over the last 13 years, I’ve had to learn how to compromise, how to collaborate, how to let go of things. I’ve even had these hired gun gigs with Twisted and Avenged where I just played drums, so we’re just going to have to find our feet in the new dynamic. I think there will be many areas that I hope I could regain some control – like writing the setlists was always a big one for me – but then there’s other areas that I’m more than happy to step away and not even be involved with. I’d be happy to not write any lyrics again. I used to always write a lot of lyrics back in the day, but I’d be fine with not doing that. It’s a lot of things. Designing the artwork or the merchandise. You gotta pick your battles and I guess we’ll find our feet and see where everybody fits into the structure of the new dynamic.

BT: I’m sure you only know so much, but is the plan to get in the studio and tour, or where are you guys at this point?

MP: We’re gonna start work on a new album right after the new year. I have some remaining commitments this year still on the calendar. I’m about to leave for Japan with The Winery Dogs, I have a gig with Metal Allegiance in January, and I have some gigs with Flying Colors in March. So these are things that have been on the calendar for a while. I have a gig with Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, another gig with Umphrey’s McGee for New Year’s Eve. So I’m gonna finish out those commitments, but pretty much after the new year, the focus for me is gonna be Dream Theater, and we’re gonna move into the studio and start working on a new album. And it remains to be seen where and when the first gig or gigs will be. But that’s what I’m most excited for. I cannot wait to be on the stage again in front of the most devoted fanbase in the world. I mean, the energy and the excitement that that first gig is... I’m getting goosebumps right now just thinking about it. I’ve dreamt about it. I’m telling you, [for] the last 13 years or so, I’ve probably dreamt about 100 times about what it would be like to be back in Dream Theater or to play that first show back. So it’s gonna be amazing to finally actually do it.

BT: Let’s jump into another track. We’re going to go back to the second record, ‘Under a Glass Moon’ from Images.

MP: All right. I haven’t played this in a long time! Or playing any of these songs. It’s weird ‘cause I haven’t played them in forever. And to be honest, I haven’t listened to them in forever because for those 13 years, listening to Dream Theater was a little difficult for me, to be honest. It kind of broke my heart. Now it’s nice I can actually listen to it again and enjoy it again. The tracks I’ve been playing for you guys here at Drumeo, it’s like riding a bicycle – it’s in there for life.

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BT: When people are first introduced to your playing or when people think about your playing, probably one of the things that comes up the most is all your hand to foot, like quads or those types of ideas. Who did that come from or is that some idea that you just came up with at some point?

MP: I’m the one that’s played it out for sure [laughs], but I would say I probably got it from Terry Bozzio. I was a big fan of Terry, starting with his stuff with Zappa, which really took me to another level of musical knowledge and appreciation. Zappa’s diversity and the polyrhythms and all that stuff. But I still loved everything Terry did beyond that. For instance, the UK album Danger Money was a huge influence for me. Also the first Missing Persons album, Spring Session M. There’s a lot of [plays hand-to-foot quads] That right there is almost the beginning of ‘Paradigm Shift’ and that’s become kind of the ‘Mike Portnoy cliché’ at this point, but I think I copped it from Terry first.

BT: It’s a thing you can’t get away from at this point. [laughs]

MP: It is. I guess that’s what makes a signature. If you do something enough it becomes your thing, so that’s definitely one of my things.

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BT: One thing we haven’t talked about yet is just your kit in general you’ve played some of the craziest drum kits out there – the Siamese monsters, the purple monster – is this the setup [smaller kit] you think you’re going to go into the next era of Dream Theater with?

MP This?!

BT: This kind of version or—

MP: Hell no!!!

BT: What’s the idea?

MP: Come on – you know with Dream Theater, more is more! Unless you’re Kevin, and then it’s Kevin no more! [laughs] I famously had those giant monster drum kits with Dream Theater so there’s no way I’m not gonna have that. After all those years of the massive Siamese Monster and Albino Monster and Purple Monster, blah blah blah, it was refreshing to go to The Winery Dogs and play just a Bonham setup. With all the stuff I do with Neal Morse, that’s more of a traditional 8-piece kit: one kick, three rack, two floors, little more traditional. One of the fun things playing in all these bands over the last 13 years is every one of them had different setups and different kits, so it kept me on my toes, kept it refreshing and inspiring to be surrounded by different kits for each different band. But going back to Dream Theater, I gotta go bigger.

BT: Can’t wait to see it, whatever it ends up being.

MP: Tama is shaking in their boots right now. “We’re gonna have to hire more people to build more drums!”

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BT: Tell us about ‘Panic Attack’; when’s the last time you would have played this?

MP: Last time I would have played this would have been obviously whenever Dream Theater played it last. Back in my days – in the first go around – I would write a different setlist for every show. Although the last tour I did with Dream Theater was supporting Iron Maiden in [the] summer of 2010, and we had a static setlist for that tour because it was a support slot. And ‘Panic Attack’ was in that set, so I know the answer to your question: the last time I would have played this would have been the summer of 2010. So over 13 years ago.

BT: Nice. I guess this is the first time you’ve played it since.

MP: Yeah. This will be my first time playing it without singing, cuz I sing on this entire [song]; most of those Dream Theater songs I’m singing, but ‘Panic Attack’, I’m doubling all the verses throughout the entire song, harmonizing on all the verses. Maybe it’ll be slightly easier for me to be playing it for the first time in 13 years not having to sing it as well, or not singing it may throw me off; I don’t know we soon find out we’ll find out.

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BT: For everyone watching, you can be entered to win... we’ve got signed tourbooks from Jordan and Mike.

MP: The irony of Jordan signing that particular tourbook—

BT: Was he even on this tour?

MP: No. Open up to the centerfold. We actually did this tour with no actual keyboard player in the band. Derek Sherinian was just a hired gun for that. The band photos at the start of the Awake cycle were just four of us; no keyboard player in the band. If you see the video for the song ‘Lie’, it’s just four of us.

BT: How old are you in this in this picture?

MP: That picture’s from the live video shoot which was one week after my wedding. That’s why I have braids in my hair; I had just come back from the Caribbean on my honeymoon. This was ‘94, so I would have been I guess 27.

BT: ...on the Mapex kit, too.

MP: 30 years ago. Yeah, that’s one of the very, very few times in my entire career I wasn’t playing Tama. The Awake album and tour and A Change of Seasons are the only albums in my entire 100 album discography or whatever that aren’t Tama, so that’s a rarity.

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BT: This is the outro from ‘Finally Free’.

MP: This is the end of the Scenes From a Memory album and the idea was to just have this ostinato pattern that the guys are playing and then I’m just going nuts within it. None of this on the album was written. Every night live, completely 100% different from night to night. It was always just flying on the seat of your pants, in the moment. That’s just the kind of drummer I am. I mean I love and respect people like Neil Peart that can construct a part and stick to it and execute it perfectly in the same way every single night, but that’s just not my style. I’m always about jamming and improvising. Every time I record an album I’m just improvising the fills in and out, and whatever you’re hearing on the album is whatever I played that day, and the same when you come see a concert.

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MP: ‘Pull Me Under’ was the song that put Dream Theater on the map. I think it’s pretty safe to say if we didn’t write that song, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. It’s weird – it wasn’t even supposed to have been on the album, and at the last minute, our A&R guy at the time, Derek Oliver, asked us to write one more song, maybe something a little more concise. At 8 and a half minutes, I don’t know if we nailed the concise part, but I think we definitely nailed something that was easily digestible. I mean, it’s not a terribly difficult song. For me, for the drum parts, it was more about just being as creative as possible, but at the same time, it’s all pretty much 4/4 and nothing that’s really terribly difficult to play.

BT: I’m curious, when’s the last time you played this, because you’re playing this in 2023 and it’s probably been like 13 years.

MP: It was announced that I’m rejoining Dream Theater only a few weeks ago at the point of filming this, so for me to play this now, it’s kind of just like riding a bicycle; the muscle memory is just there for life. It’ll be there forever.

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MP: The fill into the final chorus [is] definitely something that’s become kind of one of my trademark fills between the hands and the feet. I mean that’s something that I’ve kind of made a whole career out of, but I think ‘Pull Me Under’ and that fill right there before the final chorus was probably the first time it really made a grand entrance in my arsenal. The whole final section, we had this ostinato. I liked shifting with the feels and shifting the grooves so sometimes it’s a straight 2/4, and then sometimes... It’s all 4/4, but it’s a matter of how I’m accenting the snare. Sometimes it’s on the two and the four, sometimes it’s on the upbeats.

One idea I had in the studio was at the very end, let’s just yank the carpet out from underneath the track, and I ripped it off from the end of side one of Abby Road. [It’s the] same thing where it has all these sound effects building and building and building, and it’s just an ostinato part, and then all of a sudden it just stops. When Images and Words came out, a lot of people thought that they had a defective CD. They were trying to return it, because, “Oh at the ending of the first song ‘Pull Me Under,’ it cuts off. Something’s broken. I have a defective CD.” But no, that was intentional.

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MP: This song is definitely the most played song during my time with Dream Theater, and I guess when you play a song a few thousand times, you sometimes get bored with it and start messing with it. One of the things I used to always do to drive the band crazy – we never played with click tracks or live things – and the tempo is what I say it is, and there’s a lot of live versions of it where we called it the ‘warp speed version’ of ‘Pull Me Under’ where suddenly I would speed it up, and then I would slow it down. It was always an unspoken thing; they just had to follow me. It was always just depending on my mood in the moment. If I felt silly or whatever, just wanted to mess with the guys, I would just immediately go into warp speed or go into super slow mode, and those guys were always such sports and always followed me with wherever I went. After a while I just had to get playful with the whole song just cuz we had played it so many times.

There you have it Dream Theater’s most famous track. In fact, we put out a greatest hits album and the name of the album was Dream Theater’s Greatest Hit and 21 Other Pretty Cool Songs, because we only ever had one hit and it was ‘Pull Me Under.’ Like I said, I wouldn’t be here talking with you if that track hadn’t blown up the way it did back in ‘92. I’ve played it thousands of times in the past, and I look forward – now that I’m back in Dream Theater – to playing it thousands of more times for you in the future.

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MP: ‘The Dance of Eternity’ is pretty universally agreed upon to be one of the most technically challenging things I’ve ever written. If you don’t know the backstory, on the Images and Words album we had a song called ‘Metropolis part 1’; for years and years and years, everyone was like, “Wow! When are you gonna do a ‘Metropolis part 2’?” Long story short, we ended up writing a song called ‘Metropolis part 2’; it turned out to be about a 20 minute epic. When the time came to begin the Falling Into Infinity album, the label wouldn’t let us put it on there. A few years later Jordan Rudess joins the band and we decided, “OK, what is the first album we’re gonna make with him?” and we decided, “Let’s do a concept album and let’s take that original ‘Metropolis part 2’ demo and expand it into a full length album.” So we ended up writing an entire album called Metropolis part 2: Scenes From a Memory. Once we got to the center of the album, we decided we wanted to write the craziest instrumental we could possibly write and this is what we came up with.

BT: I think I remember there’s this one video of you with all the time signature changes. Do you know how many time signature changes are in this song?

MP: Oh God no! This song has so many twists and turns, and it’s constantly going through all these different things. Some of them are call backs or recalls to the middle of ‘Metropolis’ – there’s a section towards the end of ‘The Dance of Eternity’ where it’s going [mimics drum part starting at 4:24] which are all group groupings of fives and sevens. The entire Scenes From a Memory album has all kinds of little nuggets like that and call backs to the original ‘Metropolis part 1’, but ‘Dance of Eternity’ as an instrumental we were able to really dig into it and get pretty clever. There’s all kinds of clever things throughout the song. A lot of it stems from my fascination with numbers. For instance, once we kick in we kick in with this pattern. [plays part starting at 0:57] All that was, was me coming up with something. “OK, we’re going to do two,” and then, “Now let’s do three.” “Now let’s do four.” And then we come back to the number thing, but let’s reverse it. So instead of going 2-3-4, when we come back to it, we go 4-3-2. So it’s a similar thing that I’ve done throughout my career, especially with Dream Theater music, of trying to play with numbers and different patterns and get creative in that way.

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MP: This song was always a real challenge to play live. It’s funny, here at Drumeo I don’t know if it will have been released before after this, but I did a version of ‘Instrumedley’; I played along to that which was a live medley of instrumental sections and there’s bits and pieces of ‘The Dance of Eternity’ in that, but that was a live version where the tempos were flying! When I came here to Drumeo to play this version – the studio version of ‘Dance of Eternity’ in its entirety – it was shocking how pulled back the tempos were and it was way more relaxed. I guess live, inevitably the adrenaline is always going. I think it’s always good to have that push and pull, and if you’re excited, go with it; I’ve always been a fan of the human element. But yeah, this one was always a challenge and it was always hard to pull back and let these parts breathe because it’s so exciting; the adrenaline is just going when you get to the song in the set.