On The Wheel With Jordan

Jordan Rudess has been quite busy lately with the composing and recording of various albums, so there was a lot to talk about when I gave him a phone call on the 4th of October. On the next couple of pages, you can read about his new solo CD “Feeding The Wheel”, his work with David Bowie and of course some news on the new Dream Theater album. Enjoy!

Erik Hulsegge: How are you doing?

Jordan Rudess: I’m doing good.

EH: Well that’s good to hear and I’m glad to do this interview with you.

JR: Thanks, I’m just moving to my studio here this morning, that is about a 100 yards away from my house.

EH: So you’re composing some new music today?

JR: No, I just came here to talk to you, it’s early in the morning and we did some family chores around the house.

EH: Alright, so you’re enjoying a couple of days off?

JR: Yeah actually I am, we just finished doing all the Dream Theater stuff, you know: mixing and mastering and so on. As a matter of fact: on my way out to the studio just now, I tripped over a box that I think has the final Dream Theater product in it, the FedEx guy just delivered it.

EH: That sounds promising.

JR: Yeah it does, I’m looking at the box right now but I haven’t opened it yet.

EH: On the Internet I read that something went wrong with a keyboard part or something?

JR: Yeah! (laughs) That was really crazy. I was listening to the mix of Kevin Shirley and keep hearing the same part go by and there’s no keyboard on that part. So I was wondering: “what’s going on?” At first I thought maybe Kevin is just focusing on the sound of the guitar but when he finally was very close to be getting ready to mix I said: “Shouldn’t you turn the keyboard up a little bit?” When he said: “WHAT keyboard?” “Well you know: the KEYboard part.” It was a thing like... (Jordan plays the part on his piano) and then John Petrucci did a thing like... (Jordan plays John Petrucci’s part on his piano) and then it stopped but there was nothing there on the tape. I said: “there HAS to be”. And then Kevin went looking through all the files over and over again, but ended saying: “Well I guess I screwed up”.

EH: But you HAD actually played this part?

JR: Yeah no doubt, it was in my computer, I do the whole thing in MIDI with the program called Performer; but the whole thing was done. I guess it probably got lost in transferring from one computer to another. Then I was wondering if anybody had this part on CD or any of the rough mixes or something, because I couldn’t remember the sound just exactly. I did remember it was piano related with something else. So I had to do it again, but I didn’t have any of my instruments when we were in the city at the studio Hit Factory, so I said let’s have a look around. (laughs) I had been playing a grand piano in a room earlier, so it didn’t take long to decide I had to play that piano.

EH: So this is a little surprise on the CD?

JR: Yeah, because I wasn’t planning to play the grand piano. But it’s not a big piano part you know, just the stuff I played for you over the phone. (Jordan plays the part again!).

EH: Recently you wrote a piece on the Internet about the 40-minute title song of the new Dream Theater record, which really made me laugh.

JR: Yeah, all the people were wondering why I had so much time, because as a keyboard player of Dream Theater you’re not allowed to take a day off! (laughs)

EH: Yeah, I think you’ve been quite busy lately!

JR: It has been incredible. I just feel like the last couple of years have been insane. Actually, this week I was going to do some more work on the Rudess Morgenstein Project, but as Monday came along I was like: I just need to relax! (laughs) I have been really enjoying it NOT having to go to the studio and everything can wait a little bit.

EH: Your solo album will be out on the 23rd of October isn’t it?

JR: Yes, I heard that it was already sold in Finland, sadly, because that’s not fair. I’m sure this happens all the time; some stores just don’t wait.

EH: When did you get the idea to do a new solo album?

JR: When I got home from the last Dream Theater tour, I had gotten a call from Pete Morticelli (the head of Magna Carta) who said “I would love to have you do a solo album, what do you think?” Like I said, I just got home, I was a year on the road and I was like wow, it sounds interesting to me but I don’t think this is something I want to do right now, but let me think about it and I’ll call you back. So I hung up the phone and I spoke to my wife, I told her this guy wants me to do a solo album, but I’m a little tired and I want spent time with the family. And she said, “You’re so crazy you have to do it”. I was like: what???? (laughs) This is the same person who is going to be saying stay home with the family, now telling me to work more. So I thought about it and I always listen to the boss. I figured out that I’ll do it and I called Pete Morticelli and said let’s go! The whole logic of it was that I had just spent time on the road so everybody’s awareness to who Jordan Rudess is was very high, so it was a good time to make it. So I quickly got into the writing music mode when I got home.

EH: Did you have any ideas yet at that time?

JR: No, I started from scratch on the road. I didn’t really do much composing while on the road with Dream Theater. I was just learning how to live on the road. When I got home I spent about two months just writing all the music for my solo album. It took about easily the same amount of time just to do the logistical part of the album. To get all the different players really costs a lot of energy.

EH: How did you choose the players on this album?

JR: Well, each one comes to me in a different way: a couple of them were from the record company. They had worked with Terry Bozzio before, but I really didn’t know him although I am a big fan of him. What I wanted to do originally was to use a few different drummers and Terry Bozzio was definitely on my list and then Rod Morgenstein and Nick from Spock’s Beard, Mike Mangini and I had some ideas about doing it that way. With all the logistical complications, the record company said it was not going to be easy to do it that way, and advised me to use one drummer. And they encouraged me actually to make it Terry because they thought like: I have my Rudess-Morgenstein project; they wanted me to do something a little different.

EH: But that’s not a bad choice isn’t it?

JR: No, not at all! I am happy to say that Terry Bozzio is one of the very, very best. So I said “great, if he wants to do the whole album, then let’s go!” So they arranged that and also the other thing that was through them was getting Billy Sheehan. Even though I am a Billy Sheehan fan, I originally had the plan to do the whole album by myself. I had the idea that I just walk into my studio and create an album, that’s what I do you know? Although I play in a band called DT, I make all the sounds myself usually and that’s it. When we were talking about different ideas and even the marketing of it also, it was apparent that it was going to be cool to have some other players. Even the drum thing: it is pretty important that if you want something is gonna rock, for me to have a real drummer. Hence like the Rudess-Morgenstein Project where I do all the sounds except for the drums. Of course I have all the connections like Steve Morse who I played with in the Dixie Dregs. Steve and I had discussed even back when we were playing together that it would be really cool to work on a project together. So when I was writing this music and as soon as we decided to use some guest musicians I immediately thought of Steve and it was really, really cool because he came up with some parts that sounded kind of “Dregsie” and it was so perfect. You haven’t heard it yet right?

EH: No, just the samples and they sound very promising.

JR: Yeah, I think you will like it. So Steve played great and of course the other guitarist is John Petrucci!! John did some wonderful things for me. Steve just played some leads, but John actually went back to beef up the things in places where I had played some sampled guitars and midi guitar stuff. Although my samples were really cool sounding, you can’t really reproduce the coolness of a John Petrucci rhythm track on a keyboard; there is just no way. In some cases I left what I had played because it is a different sound and then John played on top of it, which was amazing! Really super heavy and cool! He also played some great, great leads, very wonderful stuff. And then I had my friend Mark Wood who is an electric violinist. He makes his own violins, called Viper violin, that’s really interesting. His job was twofold: number one: play some cool leads on the album. But also there were a lot of orchestral type sections where I use a lot of samples and the music was almost classical. It’s kind of a neat approach to use an acoustic instrumentalist with a lot of the samples because it makes it sound more real. So he did that as well. So he was like double track violin along with my orchestral string lines. Then I had my friend Eugene Friesen come and play. Eugene is someone that I met while playing with the Paul Winter Consort. He is a fabulous musician, he has got a great ear and a great sense of rhythm. I knew that I wanted to have Eugene on one of my recordings and this was a great opportunity. So Eugene had a similar role in that he didn’t play leads on his cello. He beefed up the orchestral sections and he also sings along with his cello, kind of in unison. It’s almost like one instrument and you can hardly tell it’s a voice because it’s so connected with the cello. You can hear it for example at the end of the song “Headspace”. Also on the record is Barry Carl, who is from a group called Rockapella and he is the bass voice in the popular show “Carmen San Diego”. Barry is a guest on my record in a couple of ways actually. He is the spoken word voice, the album opens up with where he says: “At the moment of your birth.” (Jordan with a very low voice). At the end there is a bit of a surprise which we’ll let people find out for themselves. Barry also wrote some of the spacey quotes that you can find in the package. I explained to him what my concept of “Feeding The Wheel” was. He took it home and he came back with some really great ideas. And then I used a new talent; his name is Peter Ernst. He is a classical guitarist. I discovered him at a party where he was playing the guitar. I didn’t know him at all and I just was taken by the sound quality of his music. I found out that he was going to Juilliard School of Music, so we had a little connection there. After speaking with him I told him that I have some recording projects and maybe one day would call him. So a couple of months later I called him and he was very excited. He played on one song, which is called “Shifting Sands”; this song ends actually with just him. You can even hear him breathing.

EH: On “Shifting Sands” you play guitar yourself didn’t you?

JR: Yeah, originally I was thinking that I would play a lot of guitar. As a matter of fact at the last day of the Dream Theater tour I had borrowed one of John Petrucci’s Ernie Ball guitars and I thought I’ll get my chops going on the guitar and play a lot of the guitar parts myself. But then when you hang out with people like John Petrucci, it almost seems ridiculous playing guitar yourself, I mean think about it. (laughs) So I took more of my effort into my keyboard tracks. But I did have fun playing the guitar and on “Shifting Sands” I decided to do a backwards Hendrix kind of thing. So I recorded this part as kind of distorted cool lead sound and I played it into my Kurzweil, reversed it and then I put it into the track and it came out really, really groovy.

EH: You use a lot of different sounds and melodies; do you have someone who acts as your sparring partner for your music?

JR: Yeah, the person that’s around me the most is my assistant Bert Baldwin. Bert is a very interesting fellow and he runs the video at the Dream Theater shows. But when we are home he’s my personal assistant and he is a very musical fun guy and I always ask him what he thinks. He made it to the CD as well, he played one little keyboard part and I had him rapping on the song called Revolving Door with me.

EH: You already mentioned the concept of “Feeding The Wheel”; can you elaborate a bit more on this?

JR: Absolutely. The reason the album is called “Feeding The Wheel” is because that particular concept has been on my mind for all around the making of this record. It is something that I relate to that way of thinking about things. I mean the wheel is an expression obviously and in this case the wheel means the rotation of our lives. You can think of our lives starting out at point A and then moving, moving, moving until you end up at the next crossing when you die. Whether it goes on from there we can ask John Petrucci. (laughs) Everything is always spinning; the planet is spinning and all our lives are spinning around. The idea of “Feeding The Wheel” to me is everything that we do as an individual is keep our lives in motion and direct our life. If we don’t take any actions and we just sit around we’re still moving, we’re still kind of on the wheel and we’ll still begin at one point and end up at the other. So I think it’s in everyone’s control to actually influence where we journey in our lives, our own path. And I think there has to be a certain amount of action taken on the part of each one of us to make sure that we stay on track. Certainly things are going to happen to us that we have no control of, if we want it or not, each one of us are not that powerful to determine our complete destiny. I think we are in charge of influencing that and making sure that we at least have some control to it. So the idea of “Feeding The Wheel” is that there are certain things that we can do for ourselves that give us enough energy to move along in a controlled fashion on the wheel. Things like education, exercise, meditation, listening to music or playing music, it all supports our psyche and it gives us strength. So these are the things that were on my mind while making this record and although it’s not a concept album, there is a concept that surrounds the making of it.

EH: Have you ever thought about expressing this concept more by adding vocals?

JR: Well, originally when I started the record I was thinking about it, but then it is much different than I thought anyway. The fact that it’s not just me in the studio and it has so many guests, there was a certain point where I thought: okay this is cool enough. (laughs)

EH: So that would have been too far away from the original idea?

JR: Yeah, the last solo album I did many years ago, “Listen”, which was less rock orientated, had me singing. I don’t think any of the Dream Theater guys ever heard this one, or maybe they did and that’s why I don’t sing. (laughs) It was cool and fun, but this time I wanted to do an album with all the keyboards and rocking and all my different crazy styles. Next time maybe I’ll do some vocals.

EH: Okay, we’ll wait and see. You already mentioned that the music on this album is very diverse. How would you describe it yourself?

JR: It really is a full blend of a lot of the styles that I am into. The focus is a rock energy kind of album. Although there are definitely other things, like there is a piano solo on there, it has some aggressive bits but also has some romantic piano, almost classical piano it really is a mix of a lot of my influences. There is some really jazzy piano on it with some walking bass things. It is almost like on Dance Of Eternity, where I do the Honky-Tonk thing. I play more games with music like that. I like taking the listener on a journey, so you can be blinking a little bit and maybe get a little laugh. Like the little rap that Bert and I did in Revolving Door. That song is a good example, it starts out with a very strange aggressive orchestral bit and then it goes into an Irish progressive rhythm part, which goes into a piano section, which then crosses into a Dream Theater section. So there is a lot of stuff and it is not even that I think about my music so sectionally, I really don’t. I just write it, it’s seldom that I think: okay we are going to throw in this part. It is more like this is what comes out of my head.

EH: It is a natural process?

JR: Yeah, I have always been like a natural composer. In many ways it’s not an effort for me to write music, that’s why I’m an improviser. I can sit down in a room and just play for 2 hours and play all new stuff. The thing that might take time is when I sit down and want to commit to something. My style, the combining of all my influences to create something new is something that I always had an easy time with. There are other aspects of life that are a little more difficult. (laughs) But the natural musical part, thank goodness, comes fairly easily.

EH: It’s nice to have this talent.

JR: Yeah, but I can’t do anything else. (laughs) I’m very one sided you can ask my wife. (laughs) You can interview her next.

EH: Up until now your solo CDs were only available through Internet. Is there any chance that these will be distributed to the retail stores?

JR: Well, this album will have very good distribution because it’s through Magna Carta. That’s very exciting for me, because as you said it is my first solo album after many years of making music that actually is going to be like something that people can go into a store and buy. I hope that one day I’ll be able to get “Listen” to big distribution. It’s a little bit challenging for me with the record company that owns that. They are very hesitant to give it up. They think that one day it will be gold and they sell it for a million dollars. So number one they don’t want to give it up and number two they don’t want to spend the money to distribute it. So figure it out, I don’t even know. They sell copies to me to sell on the Internet, but it is a crazy situation. The other albums “Secrets Of The Muse”, “Resonance” and “A Christmas Carol” I kind of enjoy, at least at this point, to keep it to myself. They are almost personal kind of albums; they are very meditative piano based. I will make a mellow one soon that will be better distributed. (laughs)

EH: Besides this solo album, you did some work with David Bowie. How did you get involved?

JR: I have worked quite a bit with his producer, Tony Biscante, who you might know from the Moody Blues, David Bowie and T-Rex. Tony and I have known each other for years, he actually lives in the same county as I do. Tony produced the new album of a band called Prefab Sprout, on which I played the keyboards. And then a couple of years ago I did something with Tony for David Bowie. David wasn’t there, but I had him in my headphones. I did two songs, I played piano on a song that was supposed to be for the Rug Rats movie and the other one was a song that was going to be for a tribute album for John Lennon that Yoko Ono was or is producing. Both songs have not come out yet. People thought that the song for the Rug Rats movie was not appropriate so David will maybe put it on his next record. Most recently Tony got the job for producing David’s new record, so he called me up and asked me if I wanted to come down and play some keyboards and I said, “yes definitely I’ll be there”.

EH: Did you write the music together with David Bowie?

JR: No, I went in and he already had about 19 songs and he was trying to weed out some of the songs that he didn’t want to use. This was kind of a funny job for a Dream Theater member because he wanted the keyboard part so basic. He didn’t want to have any fancy riff, like a lot of triad chords, really easy. My instructions were: just play things that people will feel like is in their reach. Nothing that’s complicated or so that feels like how did he do that. After I blinked a little bit, I said okay, I can do that. I can play mellow. (laughs) I was glad he told me that the first day. So people have to listen to my solo album and the new Dream Theater album if they want to hear lots of amazing play.

EH: When will this album be in the stores?

JR: I don’t know. David is now putting all the things together.

EH: Do you play on all the songs on this album?

JR: No, I played on 7 or 8 songs, but they have to do the mixing and hopefully I end up on some of the songs. But I definitely had an interesting experience up there, hanging out with David Bowie for a week as you can see on the picture, unless I’m very good with Photoshop. (laughs) It was cool to hang out with him because he is such a famous guy and he was a very nice fellow and very upbeat and a lot of laughing. He also gives the most wonderful descriptions like: (Jordan talking slowly trying to imitate David Bowie) “We are sitting here late at night inside a French restaurant at an old dusty upright piano, and everyone has left the building. It is very quiet and there is candlelight and you are just playing the piano slowly, thinking about the long day you had”. He was like taken me on a journey with his words just to get me to play the kind of thing that he heard in his head. And then I would get it, and then he would keep going. (laughs) So I stopped playing and just listened to the story. (laughs)

EH: Is there any chance that he will ask you to go on tour with him?

JR: I really don’t know, we didn’t discuss it when I was there. I don’t know if he’s been planning on touring or not. It’s hard to say.

EH: But if he will ask you, will you do it?

JR: I don’t know that either, obviously Dream Theater is my number one priority. I have to keep my fingers moving, if they slow down too much I don’t know what will happen. So I have to be careful which gigs I take. If it’s just going to be tryouts I have to play with my toes. (laughs)

EH: Alright, let’s move on to the new Dream Theater album. This is your second album with Dream Theater, has your role as contributor changed?

JR: The difference is that in the “Scenes From A Memory” album there was a lot of adjustment to really understand what my role was going to be. It took easily a month, even though I had worked a lot with John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy during the Liquid Tension sessions. It really took some understanding because Dream Theater is a group, that even though there is a lot of different styles, there are some stylistic limitations that are part of the group. You can’t go outside of a certain ground otherwise it doesn’t relate to what people know as Dream Theater. With Liquid Tension we didn’t have the same kind of rules. It was more like four guys get together and throw things in a pot and stir it around a little bit and then you end up with whatever it is. With Dream Theater I came into a very established entity and I just thought how I’m I going to fit in? So there was almost a month of almost painful growth and finding out what that was and writing stuff and not having it be accepted. For “Scenes From A Memory” I came in with 50 different ideas and actually a lot of that did make it to the record or parts of it, but a lot of it didn’t and that was a little bit painful. So with the new album I didn’t write anything, I took the opposite approach. I walked into the studio cold, without having any ideas. So maybe they like that better. (laughs) So we started out writing and after about two weeks I thought to myself I probably should have written something. Because Mike and John get connected very quickly, they have worked together for 15 years. So they immediately find this thing and go with it and no matter who you are it’s hard to get in between them, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. So there are some sections on this album that are very, very guitar heavy and dark where they’re just going off and doing their thing and that’s very cool! My role in that was to come back later and put some really spacey cool sounds in it. The other side of this record is that there is some really all out keyboard things going on as well. I finally realized that I couldn’t necessarily write everything while we’re all together in the room jamming. That only worked to a point. As we went on I started to write some ideas or I would listen to what we were working on altogether and I would take a break and come up with some stuff. The end result of this album is that you’ll hear all the kind of extremes of Dream Theater. You hear the really, really heavy side as I described, but you’ll also hear the really proggy side or keyboard side of Dream Theater. So there is really everything there, I think the fans are really gonna dig this album. The notes and the harmonies get written, at least instrumentally, by John Petrucci and myself. John Myung comes up with some nice riffs here and there. And he is like: “hey guys how about this”, and we all stopped and looked and we were like “that’s cool, let’s use it”. Mike of course is not going to sit around and not do anything. He is sort of the master of conceiving the whole song, like: “this part we’ll repeat then we’ll transpose, then it’s got to build and then we’re gonna slow down, how about a measure of 6/8?”

EH: So do you think there are more of your ideas on this record than on “Scenes From A Memory”?

JR: I think it’s very similar, I have a lot to say about it all.

EH: Did you write any lyrics?

JR: No, I didn’t write any lyrics. John Petrucci wrote most of the lyrics and James wrote a song and Mike wrote a bunch of lyrics too.

EH: And what about background vocals?

JR: No, I didn’t. Those guys don’t know I can sing.

EH: So then you should play “Listen” for them! (laughs)

JR: Yeah right, and then they’ll say “definitely don’t sing”. (laughs) I don’t know if I’m not singing because they heard that or because they didn’t hear that. Maybe you can ask them in an interview, I’m curious what they will say. (laughs) But I don’t have a strong desire to sing. I’m so busy at the keyboard with changing all my sounds and stuff, I kind of feel like that’s enough.

EH: On the Internet I saw that you took some lessons in world music, what’s that all about?

JR: I had the feeling that it was a very good opportunity, before we made this record, for us all to learn something. I was very anxious to take up some new things. I like to remain fresh and I have some wonderful resources in the world music. I have some great friends who I play with like in the Paul Winter Consort who have so much information. There is a fellow who I know from years ago who is an expert in all kinds of ethnic music, especially like Indian music and he helped us a lot. We didn’t really have that many sessions, we had three or four different sessions and they were great! It’s not like anybody is going to hear this record and say “Ohh this is an African section or Indian”, not at all. It was strictly done just to inspire us, to give us some fresh thoughts. I mean we are Dream Theater, we can’t go back and just be who we were. We need to expand as musicians. Luckily we all have that interest and do not stagnate, because that is very, very boring. I mean, who wants to hear us doing the same thing over and over again? Yes, there are certain stylistic things that we have to maintain to be who we are and at the other hand we can grow. I think it functioned very well; there are certainly a couple of skills that we used here and there that was influenced by our sessions. One I can think of in particular is where we were taking a lesson and all of a sudden John Petrucci and I started to jam on this one thing, it sounded like Dream Theater but it was in the tonality of what we were learning.

EH: Mike showed us the inspiration corner, which contained a lot of heavy bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Pantera. Is that your cup of tea as well?

JR: I never owned a Pantera record, nor have I owned ever a Metallica record. Although when I hear it I think it’s kind of cool, I like it.

EH: In our John Petrucci special, John mentioned that he learned a couple of things from you by trying to play the parts you do on keys on his guitar. Does this kind of learning apply to you as well?

JR: Obviously the keyboard and the fret board are so different. So the riffs that John will come up with are different kind of riffs than the riffs that I will come up with and we can always learn from each other and we always do. It’s almost like a natural thing. I think that John has a unique interest personally in some of the ways the voicings happen on the keyboard. I play some guitar so I’ve a little head start in actually picking Up that side of things and I’ve never seen him play the keyboard. The keyboard is such a wonderful source for any musician to really get a grasp on music. If you are learning to conduct or any kind of instrument, people always recommend that you learn some keyboard. And there is a reason for that because it makes so much sense harmonically to see the way things happen on the keyboard. I think that’s why John has expressed that. It’s an interesting thing to get away from the fret board mentality. For me, I’m always learning things from other instrumentalists in general. As a keyboardist you have to deal with all these different sounds, so I have to keep a very open mind and a very open ear. Like when I play a French horn part, I want to know how the French horn really gets voiced, what would a French horn do?

EH: If you take a look at your discography, you can see that you have done a lot of things in your musical career. If you look back for a moment, have you accomplished the things you had in mind when you were a young boy?

JR: When I was a young boy I was completely focused on classical music and I was going to be a classical pianist. But that all changed when I started to listen to bands like Genesis and Gentle Giant. Actually people tried to corrupt me and bring over Yes albums and this was all interesting to me. When I started to get into other kinds of music, I started to have other visions of what I could become. I was just thinking about this the other day, I’ve actually created quite a few albums in a number of situations and I’m fairly pleased about it. If I had it to do it over again I probably could have directed my career and I would have even more stuff. My career didn’t get fully going till at least my thirties. My twenties were more a time where I was learning and getting away from the more classical life style. Once I started making records then I’ve been on the roll for some years now. It took a little while to get into that flow.

EH: About the tragedy in New York, can you tell us what the situation is right now?

JR: Well, personally I live about 40 miles outside of the city. So where I live, life appears to be fairly normal, except for the fact that in the last couple of weeks you’re hearing about all these funerals of fireman. When you talk to people they are literally frightened to come out of their circle. Like the other night I wanted to go to the city to see Tool with Mike and his wife. And my wife was like “I don’t want to go to the city”. She thought the two of us going together over the big bridges wasn’t such a good idea, things like that. I can’t cross the bridge right now without thinking, oh fuck, what’s going to happen next. It is a really sad time in our history.

EH: Yes it really is. I still can’t believe it, because last year after the Dream Theater concert in New York, my wife and I stood at the top of the World Trade Center and now it’s all gone and so many people are missing. I heard about the Red Cross concert you did a couple of weeks ago in New York, was this an idea of your wife, like the acoustic concert you did with John?

JR: No, not really. After the tragedy happened, I was sitting around for a couple of days, as everyone else was, a little bit paralysed. Then I thought what can I do here, it was not the best idea to physically volunteer with my hands and so. But I felt that there had to be something that I could do. Because my wife’s association with the theatre, she is a producer, I thought let me try to put on a concert. My wife was very into this idea and she produced this event and helped to make it happen along with a friend of mine who was connected to the Red Cross. We only had one and a half weeks to advertise, so I put it on the Internet and put the word out that everybody should spread the word. It worked out very nicely, we had a great evening and we made $12,000 for the Red Cross. And hopefully I can rescue some music that I played that night put it on CD and give proceeds of this CD to the Red Cross as well. Actually today I’m just going through some of the recordings that were made by a friend of mine that night. I discovered that I didn’t have enough original recorded material to make up a CD. Some of the stuff that I played was like an acoustic version of “The Spirit Carries On”, “State Of Grace” and “Hourglass”. If I put that on the record it gets complicated because some songs have other writers. So I have to figure out how to divide up the proceeds.

EH: So it’s not probable that this material will be on an album?

JR: Well, what I’m about to say is that I’ll be going to take what I have from the Red Cross night and I’m adding some stuff. Because in my studio I played some stuff that’s similar to what I was doing, maybe a couple of tunes that are new. A lot of what I did that night was improvised. I’m going to create a couple more songs, so I can make a CD that’s long enough. So that’s what I’m going to do today.

EH: That would be very nice! Can you tell what a typical Jordan Rudess day looks like?

JR: Hmm, at what point?

EH: Well let’s try today?

JR: Let’s see. I walked the dog, which we have for 4 months now. So now Jordan Rudess is going to give up music and just become a dog owner. (laughs) As I mentioned I am reviewing the Red Cross material and then I have to make a decision in my typical day here, which is that I need to write some more music for the Rudess Morgenstein Project or I’m going to sit outside and just meditate. (laughs) And then of course, even though it’s the beginning of October, Dream Theater is going on tour at the end of January if all is peaceful in our world. It’s going to take me a lot of time to go through everything that I played on the record and really learn it. Because things have gone so quickly in the studio you’re not memorizing everything. I have got to go back and figure out all the sounds I used, figure out how to play them all live and switch through them. It’s a big pre-production job; it’s going to take months.

EH: At what time do you think that you’ll start with this process?

JR: I should start as soon as possible. The two things that are on my mind the most are finishing the new record with Rod Morgenstein and also getting ready to go on the road.

EH: So once again no vacation for Jordan Rudess?

JR: No vacation, that’s why I’m considering having today to be another easy day. The other side of what I’m doing is: I’ve got to figure out some video stuff for Dream Theater. As you know we had video elements in the last round of touring and figuring that out is very much on my shoulders, to understand all the technology that we are going to use and all these kind of things.

EH: Will it be the same kind of things you did on the last tour?

JR: We’ll certainly use some of that. We are thinking about doing more things based on DV clips. So that we have actually movie clips that we can cycle through. One thing that we are looking at is giving Bert Baldwin a keyboard by his video system and each key will actually be triggering a different movie. So people who will watch him play on this keyboard will be thinking: Ooh Jordan needs some help this time. (laughs)

EH: What’s your opinion on the Dream Theater fans, are there big differences between the fans in the different countries?

JR: Well definitely, it’s a very interesting study. Everybody has a different feeling about Dream Theater all over the world. For example in France they are all singing along with the keyboard riffs. When you go to Germany I find sometimes that they are very studious, everybody is looking, they want to see what he’s doing on his guitar. In Japan they can be very attentive as well, a little bit more quiet. It’s just the nature of the people in different countries.

EH: Are you looking forward to go on tour again?

JR: Yeah, it’s going to be great. Of course it’s the usual story, it’s hard to leave your family. Once we are on the road and we’re doing our thing, what can you say, it’s just cool!

EH: Alright, you’ve answered all my questions and we’ve spoken for more than an hour.

JR: Wow, that’s a good talk. Thank you so much for calling.

EH: Thank you for your time and the very nice conversation and I think we’ll meet again in January.

JR: Okay see you in January.

Erik Hulsegge