The Train Has Left The Station

We already had a brief talk with Mike about the new album at the end of the interview we did in Tampa, but at that time Mike was understandably very vague about it. This time around, however, Mike was more than happy to give more inside information about the upcoming album and invited us to give him a call. So we did, mid-August, and here you have it. All aboard!

D: Well to be direct, what’s the title of the new album?

MP: The album will be called Train Of Thought.

D: Can we expect a continuing theme throughout this album?

MP: John and I had a total discussion when we were in Europe in October, where we ended up thinking up a formula of what we wanted the new album to be. There were a lot of things that we discussed, that we had a definitive vision of what we wanted this record to be. We wanted it to be this real classic metal album. After doing Master Of Puppets and The Number Of The Beast, we said it would be great to have an album like this. Where every song is just classic and so strong. It is just powerful and strong from start to finish. We looked at our catalogue and started making a list of the songs that do very well live, are energetic and have heavy grooves and riffs. Pull Me Under is great live as are Home, The Glass Prison, The Mirror and Peruvian Skies. All those songs felt like classic songs and we wanted to make a whole album where every song was like that. So that was one of the things within the formula.

Another thing we decided we didn’t want was to make another 79-minute album. All the classic albums were like 60-minute and even less in the older days, so we really wanted the album to be around 60 minutes long and we wanted to have only about 7 or 8 songs and we’d try to have the songs in the 7 or 8 minute zone. It ended up that we wrote longer songs, (laughs) but it was a conscious approach to make the songs in that style. The songs actually ended up being 10 to 11 minutes anyway, which made the album length grow as well, to around 68 minutes or so.

Another conscious decision John and I had was to make the production more streamlined, to make it sound like a live band. Six Degrees was completely experimental in the production zone. We were layering all kinds of keyboards, vocals, drums and guitars and everything was multi-layered. We loved doing that and we could very well use that approach again down the road, but we never want to repeat ourselves from album to album. With this album we said, let’s do the complete opposite and make it sound like this amazing crunchy live album. If you listen to Master Of Puppets or The Number Of The Beast, they are not running mellotrons backwards through a reverb unit and recording sped up drum tracks, they sound like a live band.

Another thing we discussed last October was the album title. John and I were talking about how we regretted not calling Falling Into Infinity “Stream Of Consciousness” as was originally planned as we still felt it was a great title. So we said fuck it, let’s name this new album Stream Of Consciousness, let’s do it. But once we started writing the music in April, we were writing this really heavy, aggressive and energetic music and at the same time it was very deep and progressive with a lot of great playing, for some reason the phrase “Train Of Thought” ran through my head. Stream Of Consciousness and Train Of Thought are two expressions that kind of go hand in hand. You often hear these expressions used in a similar vein, so as we were writing this music it struck me that Train Of Thought would be a more appropriate name for the whole album. So I suggested going with that instead. This album is like a train, it steamrolls you like a machine and obviously the “thought” is something that Dream Theater is all about, very thought provoking. So it seems a very perfect title for the album.

Another thing in our initial blueprint was that we wanted to write one instrumental track. When we started writing this instrumental track it was flowing so naturally. The whole thing came out, like, completely natural and we were like, this is stream of consciousness writing... and we then realized we could finally use the title for this song!

D: Do you have any other song titles that you can give us?

MP: Basically the album ended up being seven songs, because they were a little longer than we first expected, therefore we had one or two songs less than we anticipated. The lead-off single, the first song that will be serviced to radio, hopefully in advance of the record, is called As I Am.

D: Are the lyrics already written for the songs?

MP: Five out of the six song lyrics are finished as of this moment. I’ll go through the album in the order it will probably be sequenced. The first track is “As I Am”, which is the shortest full band song on the album and it clocks in somewhere around 7 minutes. This song is just total balls and straight-ahead groove and seems to be the obvious track to be a single and a real strong album opener.

The second track is called “This Dying Soul” and this one is about 11 and a half minutes. This one’s sick, it’s crazy, it has some of the heaviest chunkiest riffs and at the same time it has some of the most over the top fucking playing ever. It’s kinda like The Glass Prison meets The Dance Of Eternity.

The third track is a song called “Endless Sacrifice” and it’s also 11 minutes. This song is kind of in the Peruvian Skies vein, where it starts off mellow and then builds and gets really heavy. Kinda Peruvian Skies meets Hallowed Be Thy Name! It’s a nice breather for the first half but then it gets absolutely crazy again at the end.

The fourth is called “Honor Thy Father”, it’s a ten minute song and it’s another one that is so incredibly heavy with some awesome chunky riffs and a real cool instrumental middle section that is kind of King Crimson meets Voivod!

The fifth song on the album is called “Vacant” and is the only exception to mine and John’s initial formula as it is a short three-minute song, very much in the vein of Wait For Sleep. It’s just piano, bass, cello and vocals. I almost don’t consider it as a full song because it’s more like a little piece. It’s more like a prelude to the next song, which is the instrumental under the title “Stream Of Consciousness”, which is about 11 minutes, but is different than most of our instrumentals in the past. It’s more groove and classical orchestrated than it is just a shred fest.

D: Has James already recorded the vocals for the album?

MP: We will start on Tuesday.

D: Everybody is raving about his voice during the last summer tour. It’s amazing how he kept it at such a high level throughout the tour.

MP: He really put a conscious effort into it. He began studying again and he’s definitely ready to rock in the studio!

D: How is Jordan thinking about this stuff, as he is not a real ‘metal head’.

MP: At first I was concerned about that. I was wondering if he was gonna feel not so much part of it or left out. To be completely honest, he probably has contributed a little less, because of the nature of the direction, so much is driven by guitar, drums and bass. So a lot of it is stemming from those instruments, but I don’t want to discount his contribution. Every song has some crazy over the top playing and that’s a lot of the stuff that Jordan has brought in. A lot of the crazy riffs and the unison parts. There’s definitely a lot of Jordan in it, but I was concerned about how he’d feel about it. After we finished recording all the tracks and right before we left for the summer tour, he listened to the whole thing down. He sent me an email, just glowing, completely excited and enthusiastic. He was saying this is our best album and the fans are gonna fucking love this. I think he was able to get outside of his own instrument, wanting to be up-front and I think has been able to look at it with an open mind. I mean, if you look at all the songs I named earlier: Pull Me Under, Home, The Glass Prison, The Mirror, etc.; those songs are all so heavy, but all of them are still utilizing keyboards. The keyboards in all of those songs are able to play a very present role, as well. That’s the kind of the approach he had with this album. We looked at all those songs and how the keyboards fitted in with those songs and we worked in that direction.

D: With the new album being so heavy, do you have some connections with the nu-metal scene?

MP: I don’t think so, this is more classic metal. The riffs sound more like Metallica, Slayer, Pantera or Iron Maiden. A lot of the nu-metal stuff has a very different way of writing and is almost very, very commercial. I don’t believe this music sounds like that. I think a lot of those bands all sound exactly the same to me. The only thing I will say is, I think a lot of them have really great production, the mixes and the sounds on a lot of those albums are cool. When we were listening to this stuff, we especially listened to some of Andy Wallace’s mixes and bands like Disturbed, Stereo Mud and Drowning Pool. We checked out some of those, just to hear the sounds and they have really good guitar and drum sound. They are very full sounding. I wouldn’t say much of our new music has that style to it, though there may be a riff here and there that has such a groove, that can almost have a rap thing. Every once in a while that will creep in, but for the most part it will be more classic metal, more than it is nu-metal. One thing that I still have to keep reiterating, so the fans don’t get freaked out before they hear it, it’s still totally Dream Theater!

D: Do you think that James’ voice is still suitable for this kind of music, because I read somewhere that you’d rather have had a more aggressive voice for some songs on Six Degrees.

MP: James gets a lot of criticism and there are a number of people that don’t like certain elements to his voice. To be completely honest with you, there’s a few things here and there that even we in the band aren’t necessarily crazy about, but if we would have Phil Anselmo (Pantera) fronting the band it wouldn’t be right, if we would have a Thom Yorke (Radiohead) fronting the band it wouldn’t be right, even if we would have a Neal Morse, it wouldn’t be right. The fact of the matter is that James is the voice of Dream Theater. He is able to do a lot of different things with his voice. We could never fit in with the nu-metal bands, we don’t look like that, we don’t act like that and James doesn’t sing like that, so I think we have gotten to the point where we just have to accept this is who we are and we just do our own thing.

D: Do we have all the songs covered now?

MP: No we didn’t talk about the 7th song, which is called “In The Name Of God”. It is the longest song on the album at around 13 and a half minutes. This is actually the first song we wrote when we began the writing sessions in April. It has the sickest guitar and keyboard unison section with this crazy samba thing. And a huge main riff.

D: Is it written for Neal Morse? (laughs)

MP: No! (laughs) I wonder how Neal would take to a song like this, it’s kinda... ah well, I don’t want to put words into the lyrics right now.

D: Who wrote the lyrics for this song?

MP: John Petrucci. It’s premature for me to start analyzing the lyrics, we can do that once the album is out.

D: Do you have some more scoops from the album?

MP: Well, a lot of people have been speculating about who is producing it, who is mixing it, who is engineering it, why we weren’t at BearTracks etc. So I’ll cover some of that stuff. Basically, it is the same team: Doug Oberkircher engineered it, John Petrucci and I are producing it and Kevin Shirley is mixing it. We didn’t do this album at BearTracks, simply because we wanted to be fair to John and John. We have done the last two or three albums at BearTracks, which is up where Jordan and I live and both John’s had to commute while making those records. So therefore they asked if we could make an album nearer to them this time.

We actually wrote the album in New York City, we did write it in advance by the way, which is another aspect of this album that we decided beforehand. Just because we wanted to give it that live feel and to do it differently than the last few albums, it was time to make a change, so we don’t get repetitive and redundant. We did the drum tracks and most of the guitar tracks at a studio called Cove City Studios. Then we moved into another studio on Long Island called Pie Studios and that’s where we did all the overdubs and that’s also where we’ll be doing the vocals starting next week.

E: About the single, will it be released as a CD single?

MP: No, I didn’t mean a CD single. Here in America they like to have something that they service to radio, kind of what they did with Metallica. It’s the same label, so we are comparing the way we set up our album to the way they set up the Metallica album. They’re gonna be super secretive and they’re not gonna supply anyone with promo CDs beforehand. We will have one song that will come out in advance, like Metallica did with St. Anger. I think this is the plan, we’ll send it out to radio stations, which means, at that point it will inevitably spread through the ‘net. In other words As I Am will probably be released to the public before the rest of the album comes out.

E: And what about a video?

MP: Maybe a video, I’m actually talking to the label about that now. I’m actually very interested in doing one this time around. We’ve kind of shied away from them and purposely chose not to do them for the last few albums, but I think the time is right to do one again. We are currently working that out.

E: When you guys are in the studio, you always have some CDs with you, that you call ‘the inspiration corner’. What was in it this time?

MP: There are always some CDs there, but as soon as I start talking about them, then everything immediately becomes so dissected that I’m, at this point, probably better off not mentioning them. But all the classic albums that I mentioned earlier on...

E: To wrap things up, maybe a few words about the summer tour?

MP: The shows told the stories themselves really. It was a really fun tour and I’ m glad we did it. I think the fans got exactly what they were hoping for. For us, it was a lot of fun spending time with Queensrÿche and our good friends, Fates Warning. It was just a nice summer vacation for us, it was good for us to get out of the studio and get away from it all for a little while. If we spent the entire summer in the studio, we probably wouldn’t have got any fresh air throughout the entire summer. (laughs) So this gave us a chance to get some fresh air for a few weeks! (laughs)

E: About the new tour, you’ve already mentioned that it will start mid-January, how will it proceed from there?

MP: The European tour will end in mid-February, then we’ll do ‘An Evening With...’ through America, mainly in March and Asia is already penciled in for April. It will again be ‘An Evening With...’ shows. I guess we’ll always do that, as we were spoiled by that, unless we do a package tour like we did during the last summer tour.

E: You also mentioned that there would not be 2 shows in a row in the same city this leg, so no cover shows?

MP: Yeah, I’m kind of disappointed by that, but that’s the way it has worked out with the routing and the scheduling and the offers that are made. Hopefully we can do it on a later leg or maybe the way you are proposing, a big show followed by a small show in the same city. I love doing those special shows, but this is how it has worked out for the first leg...

E: Alright Mike, thanks for all the cool inside information. We can’t wait to hear Train Of Thought.

MP: It’s amazing, I can’t wait for you guys to hear it! Bye guys.