Mike Portnoy interview (excerpts)

Paul Gargano: Dream Theater’s got the Lost Not Forgotten Archives, and I know we do a lot of those in the Metal Edge store. I think we have at least half a dozen of them in stock right now. Are you involved with those at all? Do you have any or are you appearing on any of them? Is it a sore subject?

Mike Portnoy: No it’s not. It’s okay, it’s all right. Am I involved? Well, first of all, I was one trillion percent involved with the originals. In fact, that was my project – I was the one that had the archives and put together all these releases with photos from my archives and extensive liner notes. So I was the one that put together the original Ytsejam bootlegs back – I don’t know – 15, 20 years ago. So there were about 16 or 20 titles that I did back then. So when they started reissuing these as their new Lost Not Forgotten series, I wasn’t involved at all. They were doing it all on their own, but they were reusing a lot of my original Ytsejam titles. So yeah, I was appearing on a lot of these, but I wasn’t involved with any of the artwork or anything like that. And it kind of bummed me out because I spent so much time on the originals, with the liner notes. The liner notes are real important for people to have context of what went behind all of these demos or live shows or whatever. So I wasn’t involved in these new reissues. But then John and myself started working together in 2020 – I played on his solo album, and then him and me and Jordan Rudess and Tony, we did a third LTE album. So once John and I started working together, inevitably I brought it up to him: “Hey, man, what’s up with that? Why aren’t the liner notes there anymore?” And I noticed some wrong things on some of the credits in the ones that they released without my involvement. So he was, like, “Hey if you don’t mind overseeing some of the credits and things like that...” just making sure everything is factually correct, because I’m very, very anal about that. So after about their first five or six releases, John started tying me in to make sure at least all the info was correct. Sadly, they’re still not using my artwork or liner notes, but that’s their prerogative. And then once I got involved on that level, him and the band’s manager asked if I’d be willing to maybe contribute some more things from my archives. And I was, like, “You know, what the hell? Why not?” There’s a bunch of things in my archives that... it’s a waste for them to just be sitting here at my house. So I contributed a bunch of new titles. They just released our show at Madison Square Garden opening for Iron Maiden – that is a new one. And then there’s a few others that are coming out soon that came from my archives. So I’m slightly involved at this point. Not as much as I was with the originals, but enough where I can give them a few new titles to add to the collection.

PG: And you are appearing on a handful of them...

MP: Oh well, obviously I appear on all the original Ytsejam titles. And then there’s some new ones that I’m contributing from my time, from my archives, but they also have a bunch of post-MP stuff that they’re putting out as well. The only bummer for me with the liner-note thing is now I think they have it streaming on some streaming services, and there’s no context for any of this stuff. Somebody e-mailed me a few days ago, like, “Hey, what’s the deal with this song I just heard?” And I was like, “Where the hell did you hear that?” And they were like, “Oh, it’s on Apple Music or Spotify.” And they didn’t know who was on it, they didn’t know who’s the singer. There’s some things on there that are demos with different singers. Without the context of my liner notes, it’s almost impossible for people to know what the hell these things are. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

Izzy Presley: Prog fans are not nitpicky at all! [lots of laughs]

PG: There’s probably websites devoted to figuring it all out at this point.

MP: You know what? Maybe I should do this – you just planted the thought in my head. Maybe I should just get the PDFs of all the original ones and just offer them up on my site for people to download in case they want to have something to read when they’re listening to these tracks. Some of it’s weird, weird stuff. Like demos that we did on my four track at Berklee. And if that’s just mixed in there with the Train Of Thought album side-by-side, who the hell’s gonna know what’s real, what’s old, what’s official, what’s not?