Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

David Criblez: You play in so many different types of bands. What is the variety of your activities a reflection of?

Mike Portnoy: It’s really a reflection of my musical taste. I love everything from the Beatles to Slayer. I want to be able to tap into a little bit of everything with what I do. After I left Dream Theater in 2010, that was my mission statement to get into all the different music that I love.

DC: When you left Dream Theater to do multiple projects you received some criticism. Now it seems everybody is doing it. Does that surprise you?

MP: Yeah, it has become the norm. For me the motivation was my diverse taste. I wanted to have a range of musicians to work with. It wasn’t out of necessity but rather a hunger to do as much as I can. I did get a lot of criticism after I left Dream Theater because people couldn’t quite understand it. Today it’s hard to find a musician who isn’t in multiple projects. It’s almost uncommon for someone not to be.

DC: You recently recorded and toured with your old Dream Theater bandmate guitarist John Petrucci. How did you return to playing together?

MP: It started years ago on a personal level. He and I met when we were teenagers at Berklee College of Music in Boston and put Dream Theater together. That was an entire lifetime together. Our wives play together in a band and our daughters share an apartment together in Brooklyn. There’s so much personal stuff intertwined between the two of us, even though I left Dream Theater and there were a few years of drama to get past, the personal history was too strong to not still have each other in our lives. Once 2020 hit and we were in lockdown, John wanted to work on a solo album and he called me to do that. That was our first time reconnecting on a musical level. A few months after that we did LTE3, the third Liquid Tension Experiment album and this past year we got on stage together for the first time in years. Every night you could feel the emotions in the room. If you looked out to the crowd, you could see grown men crying. It meant a lot to a lot of people including both John and I. The minute we played the first few notes, it was like we were 18 year-old kids back at Berklee again.