John Petrucci comments

Arranging

John Petrucci – Dream Theater

I got turned onto prog rock through bands like Rush and Yes. What they were doing was different to what else was going on in regular rock or metal. The players were more technical and they’d have extended solos. It wasn’t about the pop or concise side of music, it was more about experimenting and bringing in more musicianship to blow the song structure thing out of the water. If you want to have a four-minute intro to your song or write something that’s 15 minutes long, that’s fine!

The term progressive rock has expanded exponentially over the last 20 years. You used to be able to say prog rock was a certain thing but it’s really started to evolve splinter. You can call Radiohead prog and you can call Meshuggah prog, yet they sound nothing alike.

When I listen to symphonic music, certain pieces feel very proggy. If you take the title track from our album A View From The Top Of The World, it has various movements over 21 minutes or so just like a classical symphony would. Those vary in mood, tempo and time signatures and yet there are melodic themes that go throughout and reoccur, coming back in different ways every time - that’s a very classical thing to do. The musicians are required to be able to play whatever the composer had in mind, from things that are super sensitive to something bombastic and really fast or technical. We put the same requirements on ourselves.