Dream Theater: The Times Are A Changing

Do you remember the first time listening to Rush? A set of musicians so ahead of their time that their audience still hasn’t caught up with them.

Dream Theater steals no thunder from our northern fusion-metal-gods, yet what they do is blend influences into prismatic arrays of technological wizardry. A smorgasbord of sounds to filter through our willing ears. One listen to Learning To Live off their Atco debut will confuse, attack and seduce any admirer of production. The song covers the gamut from metal to jazz and back again, all served up on one twelve minute plate. The quintessential Dream Theater epic. “We never set out to write an involved twelve minute long song, but sometimes it takes that long to fully get an idea across. Why should we limit our ideas to being expressed in four minutes,” questions Mike Portnoy (DT’s skinsman).

As with so many who are pushing the boundaries of the accepted rock medium, (Metallica, King’s X, and Queensryche) this East coast band reach for no explanation. “The music is us,” claims Mike. “Our music covers everything we, as five separate and distinct individuals, listen to and are affected by.”

Mike continues, “We’ve been through a lot since our last record (1989) but we’ve learned just as much. The biggest lesson was not to compromise our music.”

“From the beginning at Berklee we knew what we wanted to do and we did it. But record, management and personnel changes clogged the system. Our last album fell flat because we couldn’t tour. It took a year to get out of our last record deal and another to find James (LaBrie, vocalist). But it’s been worth it. We have a record we’re proud of,” relates an exhilarated Portnoy.

The song count is only eight on Images And Words but the music extends nearly an hour. After being caught up in it, you will discover that an hour wasn’t long enough. Luckily you can just hit repeat on your CD player indefinitely.