Mike Portnoy interview

Samus Paulicelli: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me a little bit today. Holy crap!

Mike Portnoy: My pleasure! I’m glad we hooked up. I’ve been watching your stuff for years. I think the first time I heard you was on Devin’s album, and I remember being blown away by your blast beats and stuff like that on Devin’s album.

SP: That’s so nice of you to say, thank you. I remember you were tweeting about it or something like that when you were listening to it, I’m like, “Holy crap, Mike Portnoy is listening to something I was on – what the hell?!” Yeah, thank you, man. Yeah, this reminds me of the time you got to interview Neil for Rhythm magazine because this is my first time hosting an interview. I’ve been nervous as s*** just because of that, and plus you’re one of my drumming idols, so that’s even more pressure on me not to f*** anything up! [laughs]

MP: You can’t f*** up a conversation. A conversation is a conversation, so nothing to be nervous about.

SP: We are filming this on Wednesday, February 5th. New album Parasomnia comes out in only two more days. Myself being a huge Dream Theater fan, I’m extremely excited for this – I can’t imagine how you’re feeling right now.

MP: It’s been a long wait. This is the longest wait that I’ve ever sat on a finished album. And we started this album February 7th last year, and now it’s coming out February 7th this year – so a year to the day, from the day we entered the studio to the day we gave birth. And we’ve been done with the album since last fall, but for some reason we had to sit and wait because that’s the way the calendar worked for the label, and they had to slot it in a certain time period for the year. So yeah, it’s been a long, long wait, but finally we’re giving birth and finally the world will be able to share it with us.

SP: I’m so excited. I remember you saying on Drumeo that you had many dreams about coming back to Dream Theater over the years, that you were just so excited to play that first live show with them again. So I gotta ask – how was that first live show back? Did you have those goosebumps? Was it like pure relief, like, “Oh, I’ve been missing this”?

MP: It was such an array of emotions. I mean, there was the excitement and the energy and the adrenaline, but there was also a lot of nerves, to be honest. I’ll be honest with you – I never get nervous before shows, but that particular one was really scary. I mean, first of all, we’re playing the O2 Arena – that’s where Led Zeppelin played their reunion show, or Genesis played their final show. I mean, it’s a legendary huge arena, so yeah, that in itself was terrifying.

But also, the first night on any normal tour – the first show is always nerve-racking. But this had so much emotional weight to it. It was the first time we were playing together in, I don’t know, 13, 14 years, whatever the timeline was, and it was scary as s***, I have to be honest. It was nerve-wracking.

SP: Were you scared that you were going to play some things a little too fast? Because I’ve done that before.

MP: Oh yeah, absolutely. Not to dive right into, like, the click topic and drumming stuff – but I don’t use a click live. The only time I ever used a click live was when I toured with Avenged Sevenfold, and it’s definitely an adjustment. I remember with Avenged there were times waiting for the click to start before a song – in my head, OK, it’s like, here comes ‘Almost Easy’ or ‘Bat Country’ or whatever – and in my head I’m thinking, OK, like [claps at a certain speed] that’s what’s going in my head, and the click comes on and it’s like [claps at a slower speed] and I’m like, “No way, that can’t be real!” But that’s what your adrenaline really does.

So yeah, playing without a click like I do with Dream Theater and all my other bands, you gotta be careful of the adrenaline taking over sometimes and taking off. And there are moments – I listened back to some of that show and there’s moments, like ‘As I Am’ or ‘Panic Attack’ or whatever – where it was flying on the edge. But I won’t apologize for that. I think it’s all part of the live charm and being a real live band. I think it’s OK to have that push and pull.

SP: Absolutely – that’s all part of the live feel, right?

MP: Yeah, absolutely.

SP: So for the writing process for the new album – how’d that go for you guys? Did that feel just like old times, or were there some things that were done a little bit differently compared to, let’s say, like Black Clouds or the older stuff?

MP: Nothing about it was different from the past. I mean, of course, we changed, and the chemistry between us as now older people and having had that time away from each other – that kind of chemistry was slightly different. Our personalities are slightly different from when we left off. But the process itself was exactly the same as it was from the Majesty demo in ’85 all the way through Black Clouds & Silver Linings 25 years later.

The process was the way it always was – that we just get together, we start with the music, throw ideas out on the floor, jam on the ideas, develop the ideas, arrange the ideas, and next thing you know you have a song musically. The music always comes first with Dream Theater. Usually once we wrote and arranged one or two songs musically, I would start tracking my drums right away, because I wanted to tackle them while they were fresh. So it wasn’t like we wrote eight songs and then I tracked the eight songs – we tracked my drums as we went so the process and the inspiration was fresh.

And then once we have drums, then everybody else will track, and then once everything is tracked, then months later we’ll work on the vocal melodies, and that’s when the lyrics are written and then the vocals are done. So that’s the way the process was for every Dream Theater album in my era. I think they may have done it differently with Mangini – I’m not sure, I can’t speak of that – but all of my albums, this was the process, and it was exactly the same.

SP: That’s awesome. I was curious – when you guys do sit down to jam or write on something, does it ever start with one thing in particular, like some kind of drum pattern or a riff, or is it different every time?

MP: All of the above. The reality is the majority of the stuff will stem from a guitar riff – I mean, just naturally by way of the instrument and also John’s creativity – a lot of times that’s a starting point. But the same could be said for a bass line, or a keyboard part, or even a drum part. So we could go through every song in the discography, and they probably all stemmed from different ways and different sources each and every time. But once something is on the floor, it’s free reign for everybody to get involved and f*** with it and change it and collaborate on it. And that’s how we get what we get with Dream Theater.

SP: That’s what I was hoping. Were there any moments, like during the recording process, that felt like a unique, like, full-circle experience?

MP: The very first thing we wrote was ‘Night Terror,’ and that was a big reason we wanted that to be the first thing that the fans heard, the first single – because we wanted people to feel that very, very first source of inspiration we had playing together, that excitement. And I think when you listen to ‘Night Terror,’ you could really hear the excitement and inspiration and us feeding off of each other – even coming in with the power chords and then the big drum fills.

The drum fills there at that intro are so familiar. For some of these songs on the new album I actually had to reference old intro drum fills because it’s a big thing – I have them on ‘As I Am,’ I have them on “Nightmare To Remember,’ there’s so many songs that have the big power chords and then drum fills. So I had to reference some of the old ones to make sure I wasn’t repeating exact previous opening drum fills. But yeah, immediately when we started writing ‘Night Terror,’ it was just immediately familiar. It was like, “Oh my God, this sounds like Dream Theater!”

SP: I was so happy when I heard that track. I was like, holy s***, yes!

MP: Awesome. We wanted the fans – the first thing that they heard was the first thing we wrote, just so you could really feel that initial spark that set the tone for the rest of the album.

SP: Of course, you and I both know Dream Theater fans love dissecting every little detail of the music. Are there any hidden or subtle details on the new album that you’re excited for anyone to discover? Or maybe you don’t want to give anything like that away – that’s OK, too.

MP: I won’t give it away, but there are a lot. At some point early in the process of this album, I suggested – rather than just a collection of songs – I wanted this to be something very special. We knew this album was going to come in with a lot of attention, and I wanted it to be more than just a bunch of songs and really feel like an album. So we had the idea of treating it conceptually – like a thematic concept album – where the songs interweave and there’s themes that overlap from song to song and foreshadow early on or reprise later on. With that in mind, there’s so many nuggets and seeds planted throughout – a motif that is played one time on maybe a music box, comes back later as a guitar riff, or maybe it comes back later as a symphonic string quartet kind of approach.

So once you get really familiar with the album and listen to it two, three, four, ten times, you start to notice, “Oh s***, isn’t that from ‘A Broken Man’?” Or “This theme in ‘Dead Asleep’ – oh wow, that turns up later in the big epic at the end!” So I’m not gonna give it away, but there’s plenty of nuggets planted all throughout the album for the fans to really discover upon multiple listens.

But even if you look at my lyrics from ‘Midnight Messiah,’ there’s a lot of callbacks in my lyrics referencing some of my previous lyrics. I won’t give them away, but they’re pretty obvious – they pop out immediately. So there’s some song titles or certain lyrics from older songs that I brought back for ‘Midnight Messiah,’ just because I love planting those kind of nuggets. That kind of stuff is so much fun.

Like, if you look at the older Dream Theater albums, I always was like a nugget planter. I was always the one that – I came up with the 12-Step Suite idea of interconnecting songs that would interconnect over five albums and eight years – the way that ‘This Dying Soul’ picks up where ‘The Glass Prison’ left off. I love doing that. Or there was a string from Scenes From A Memory, Six Degrees, Train Of Thought, Octavarium – each one of those albums began where the last one ended. So I love planting those kind of nuggets, and that’s all stuff that comes from my crazy mind.

SP: You’re a genius, dude – I love finding those nuggets, so thank you. People like me really appreciate that s***.

MP: Yeah, me too. I mean, that’s why I do it – because me, as a fan, like of other bands doing it, it’s so much fun.

SP: So let’s talk about your new drum set for a second – or the new setup. First of all, f***in’ amazing. But I was curious, was there any specific influence behind the setup, or did you basically just want to do, like, another awesome variation of a big setup that you usually do?

MP: Yeah, the inspiration came from a variation of any of my previous Dream Theater monsters. I started having the side-by-side monster kits with Six Degrees – I think was the first tour I did with that kind of kit. And from then on, all of my Dream Theater kits from that point on had the side-by-side two-kits-in-one concept.

So I had the Siamese Monster, the Albino Monster, the Mirage Monster, Black and Silver Monster – so I wanted to have a new side-by-side monster for this album and tour. And in the studio, I used my Siamese Monster from the Train Of Thought tour and album. So when you hear the new album Parasomnia, that’s my old black Siamese Monster.

And I used that in the ‘Night Terror’ video because my new kit wasn’t ready yet. The left side of the kit, from my perspective – my left side – is pretty consistent for all those kits from kit to kit. But the right side is always the side I experiment with. Like, on the Siamese Monster it has the toms running backwards, like Kenny Aronoff; or the Albino Monster I had on Score or the Octavarium tour was more of a Bonham setup on the right side with a 26-inch kick.

So the inspiration for the right side of this new kit, the Dream Monster – I was going for more of a Taylor Hawkins thing, like the concert toms. I mentioned Taylor Hawkins, but realistically all my favorite drummers from the ’70s were playing single-headed concert toms: Phil Collins, Peter Criss, Roger Taylor, Alex Van Halen – I mean, those guys were all playing those single-headed concert tom kits. So I definitely wanted to have that kind of setup for the right side of this kit.

SP: All right, here’s a good one. As we’re getting older and more fragile, how do you deal with the physical pains of drumming? I was very curious about this because I remember once you said you get massages while you’re on tour. And since I have a bunch of drumming pains and issues myself, I was curious if yours were similar to mine, and what you do for body maintenance, etc.

MP: That’s a good question. For me, it’s been accumulating through the years. I’m gonna be 58, and it definitely takes its toll playing a three-hour show of such demanding music – Dream Theater plays three hours. So it’s a lot for the body to take. I started developing some physical pains in my thirties. If you look at the Dream Theater Live At Budokan DVD, I had a brace on my right elbow at that time. I was really starting to get tendonitis problems then, and that was 20-plus years ago. So I was in my thirties when I started to develop that. I had to start getting massaged regularly – I would get masseuses at the venue before each show whenever possible. Or when I go home, I have a regular masseuse that I see, a therapist.

So that’s really helped, and also chiropractic work as well helps. ’Cause I’ve had times where it f***ed with me on stage. I had one show back in ’94 or ’95 on the Awake tour – we were playing Toronto, and all of a sudden my back just cramped up, and that was it. I couldn’t move! So in between songs we had to ask if there was a chiropractor in the house and literally stop the show for 15 minutes for a chiropractor to come snap me back into place.

So yeah, it starts to take its toll. Like I said, I’m gonna be 58, and I try to warm up as best I can before a show. Usually about a half hour before showtime, I have a practice pad kit in the dressing room. I don’t have any specific routines – I’m not a rudiment type of player – but I’ll just get singles and doubles going just to get the blood flowing, get the muscles warmed up a little bit, and try to not go on stage cold if possible.

SP: Very nice, yeah, I’ve pretty much been doing the same stuff – definitely the massage. And yeah, my elbow – it’s the ulnar nerve. I don’t know if your ulnar nerve—

MP: I’m not even sure what it is. I think you must know better than me.

SP: OK, well no, I was just going to a whole bunch of physical therapists and doctors and trying to see what the hell was wrong with my wrist. It was probably just too many blast beats – just repetitive motion.

MP: I bet! Well, look at what you’re doing – you’re doing like full-on blast beats. I mean, I see drummers today and their wrists are – everyone’s doing that kind of [flicks his fingers back and forth quickly] – the technique where you can do that. Look, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. In this case, I’m an old guy – my wrists go like that [moves hands in traditional drumming way] – I can’t go faster than that. And I envy drummers like you and all these amazing drummers that do these—

SP: Stop!

MP: No, but really – I mean, you guys are physically doing things that I can’t figure out. And I suppose if I was to start taking lessons again I could get it, but I don’t know – I’m very content with myself and my limitations and physical abilities. I know I can only do so much. I have the Popeye mentality: “I am what I am.” That’s my motto.

SP: Remember that even though all the guys that are flying way faster – a lot of that inspiration came from you.

MP: I appreciate that. I do realize the evolution of drumming – it’s an evolution. I got what I do from guys like Neil Peart and Terry Bozzio and Simon Phillips and Bill Bruford. It’s a lineage. All the guys that came before me – they were learning from Keith Moon and John Bonham and Ginger Baker and Mitch Mitchell. And we all steal from each other, we all learn from each other, we all inspire each other.

And now it’s full circle, where I see younger drummers and they inspire me – younger drummers that maybe were inspired by me, now I’m being inspired by them. So it’s all full circle, we all share with each other. I just have my physical limitations of what my body and my wrists and my feet and hands can do. But like I said, it’s the Popeye mentality – “I am what I am,” and I’m fine with that.

SP: Dude, you’re good. But that was going to be part of one of my other questions. Are there any lesser-known or more modern drummers or musicians that you’ve discovered recently who have been inspiring you?

MP: Oh, so many. Especially in the age of social media. When I was younger, before we had the internet and social media, I would have to just listen to records and be inspired that way. But now obviously everything is so visual, so my Instagram feed every day is just filled with drummers that are pushing the boundaries.

It’s guys like you and El Estepario, and Eloy is another big one, and Grayson – all these guys. You guys all post these videos that are so inspiring. And you go onto YouTube or Instagram or TikTok – I don’t do TikTok, but anyway – I know that there’s this world of all these drummers posting this stuff that is just jaw-dropping and fully inspiring. It inspires me. And even if I can’t play that kind of speed or that kind of dexterity or technicality, just seeing it is inspiring. Sometimes I’ll pull from an idea or a technique that somebody does – Aric Improta, I would watch him, and he does all these kind of crazy things and with weird sound sources and stuff like that.

SP: Then he does his backflips! [laughs]

MP: Yeah, and does backflips! Well, speaking about the showmanship, then there’s guys like Zoltan Chaney that I could just watch for days – not for the technical ability, but for the showmanship. What he does on stage is so much fun to watch, and I’m a big fan of that as well. Some of my heroes are guys like Keith Moon that were just showmen – didn’t necessarily have great technique, but they were showmen, and to me that’s a big part of the picture as well.

SP: Definitely. And yeah, going back to what you were saying about having the video aspect of things now – it’s funny you say that, because the first video drumming thing I ever was really able to study was Liquid Drum Theater. I had the VHS at my parents’ house – I watched that every day. That’s pretty much the reason why I can play ‘Dance Of Eternity’ almost as good as you, because I studied, studied, studied, studied.

So again you influenced me with the videos too, because I want to inspire the younger drummers as well. So you influencing me with the videos is just giving it to the next generation.

MP: Absolutely, yeah. In my era, my generation, that was what we had – we had instructional videos. Hudson Music had all these great instructional videos, and I was lucky enough to have done a few with them. In the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s, that was the outlet to be able to learn from other drummers.

And they would have drum festivals too – like I would do the Modern Drummer Festival every couple years. The first time I did it, I was scared s***less. It was around ’94, ’95, and I was petrified. That was my first time, and that was more of a clinic mode. That was when I started doing clinics – in the mid to late ’90s I did hundreds of them. And that was a big, big part of my outlet and identity in the late ’90s.

But then I did the one in 2003. First, I came out with my Beatles tribute band, which was trying to show a different side of me, because at that point I didn’t have all these other musical bands and projects. I didn’t have an outlet outside of Dream Theater. So to me, to do a Beatles tribute band was my dream come true.

And I knew doing something like that at the Modern Drummer Festival, where everybody’s all chops and technique – I mean, I knew that was going to take balls and maybe even be poo-pooed by a lot of the purists. “Oh, nobody wants to hear somebody just playing a Ringo song.” So that’s why I added the Dream Theater coming out at the end with my big Siamese Monster, and we did ‘Instrumedley’. This way at least I got to fill in the blanks for the drumming people that wanted the big monster kit as well. So I got to fulfill one of my personal dreams and then also do something that would be fun for drummers at the Modern Drummer Festival.

SP: So cool, yeah. I remember specifically watching that show and you were doing the Beatles stuff and I was freaking out – “Oh my God, it’s Mike Portnoy! I wish it was Dream Theater stuff, but oh well, this is still great.” And then a couple minutes later, then everyone came out and I was like, “Oh!!!!”

MP: Yeah, we hit the final chord of ‘A Day In The Life’ and then the big curtain rises. And then also I set up my kit backwards at that show too, so the drummers could see from my perspective – which is a perspective you don’t always get, obviously, to see.

SP: To close things out here, I have one final question. What is a day like inside your head? What are you thinking about? Are you always making new plans, thinking of the next show, the next thing? Is there anything people might be surprised about?

MP: I think people would be surprised at how much I sleep. Because there’ve been so many times through the years where I’m playing – especially when I was out of Dream Theater all those years – I’d be playing in like 12 different bands and have 10 different albums coming out one year. One weekend I’d be playing with Metal Allegiance one night, Neal Morse’s band another night, The Winery Dogs another night, and I always see the comments: “When do you sleep? When do you sleep?”

And I think most people would be surprised how much I sleep. Like, I try to get 8 to 10 hours a night. But my sleeping hours are so backwards – I am a night owl. So I’m usually up till about 4 a.m. every night, and that’s when I do the bulk of my work. The bulk of my creative work happens between midnight and 4 a.m. That’s when my wheels are spinning, that’s when I’m writing setlists or sequencing songs or overseeing a video edit or making notes on a mix or writing lyrics. The bulk of my creative time is in those midnight hours, and that’s a bit of what I wrote about with the song ‘Midnight Messiah’.

The bulk of my day – you’ll be surprised – I sleep late. I usually sleep till about 2 p.m. back at home. And on tour, when I’m on tour, I usually wake up at 2 p.m., spend about an hour having my coffee, waking up, checking social media. Then usually press begins around 3 o’clock, soundcheck at 4, meet and greet at 5, dinner at 6, show at 7:30. I mean, when you’re on tour, there’s a routine that happens every day. But I even sleep till about 2 p.m. at home.

And when I’m home, I’m the laziest motherf***er you’ll ever meet. We had some time off in between the South American tour that ended in December before this North American tour begins next week. I spent about a month at home just deflating – watching TV, watching movies, spending time with my family, my kids, and my dog (rest his soul). Like, I would just spend days or weeks, months, just sitting with my dog on the couch watching TV.

SP: When you work as hard as you do, it’s not surprising that you need that time off to just decompress and not think about anything. You need the couch time, as they call it, right?

MP: Absolutely, yeah.

SP: Is there anything else you’d like to say to anyone before we end?

MP: I think we covered so much. It was awesome speaking to you. I mean, what could I say that I haven’t said a million times already? I’m just so happy to be back with Dream Theater, and making this new album has been so exciting. I can’t wait for people to hear it. It’s been a long time coming for us, having made the album we started a year ago. So we’re so excited for it finally to drop.

And the tour has been incredible – the love and the emotions at each and every show, everywhere we’ve been so far. You feel the excitement in the air and the love in the air, and it’s been amazing watching grown men cry at a rock concert each and every night. It’s been awesome.

SP: Awesome. Well, Mike, again, I seriously cannot thank you enough for taking the time to chat with me today.

MP: Thanks, bro.