Dream Theater

No strangers to adventurous ideas, Dream Theater have outdone themselves with the double concept album The Astonishing, which features over two hours of the most melodic music the US Prog-Metallers have recorded thus far. Set many years in the future when technology (and music!) have been forgotten, the hero of the story tries to reintroduce music into society, only to be stifled by the powers that be. This will sound familiar to followers of Rush’s 2112 masterpiece, but here there are more main characters and a more involved storyline, all created by guitarist John Petrucci and put to music by Petrucci and keyboard player Rudess.

“John had a preliminary synopsis of the story,” recalls Rudess casually, obviously undaunted by the size of the project. “To backtrack a little, first of all the band had wanted to do a concept album for a while, we were just waiting for the right time to do it, and I knew John was working on something. So he showed me the story and I thought it was pretty cool, I liked it. It had a lot of depth to it and it was different to anything we’ve ever done. It inspired me to get into a musical state of mind and start writing some cool music, so it was all good.”

“It’s just like a classic story,” he continues. “It’s much more detailed than something like Scenes From A Memory, a lot of that was left to the listener’s imagination, in this story it’s all laid out and you have all the elements of a classic story. My experience with the story is the more time I spend with it, the more I get out of it and enjoy it, so I hope that the listeners will feel the same way.”

Some of the musical themes will be familiar to Dream Theater fans, but Jordan’s parts are all specially written. He explains, “For me it was all new music. Once I got home from the last world tour I started to write a lot of music and it was all for this project. John had a couple of themes in mind when he started thinking about this concept, which was over two years ago, so he already had some of the main themes that he wanted to have in it, but in the end we wrote a ton of music for this and ended up with over two hour’s worth. It’s definitely something that needs a lot of thought and time. We were very conscious all the time of the story and we had to almost treat it like a film score, the music had to describe what was going on and we wanted to have themes for the characters and certain moods that depicted the different characters. John and I would sit in the studio writing this album and we had a computer program that was like index cards of the story and all the characters, we would decide on themes and little motifs that would have to come back in different places. It was a whole different process, it was really like writing a show.”

Jordan certainly seems relieved that he wasn’t responsible for matching up the lyrics to such a mammoth project. He says, “John Petrucci wrote all the lyrics so I can only tell you what he told me, and he said that crafting the lyrics so that they would be clear, and to tell the story, and to flow musically, and to basically say everything that he wanted to say, was a big job. He would sit for many hours and concentrate on telling the story in as succinct a way as possible, and what I think he ended up with are lyrics that are very clear. You can imagine that with such a detailed story the lyrics could become so involved and obtuse, but the lyrics really tell the story and they retain the musical sound, which is important to someone like me who doesn’t write lyrics and is just thinking about the music. The feeling of it and the quality of the words all go very well with the music that we wrote.”

To complicate things even further the band brought in an orchestra and a choir, which is even more work than just writing for five band members. Rudess agrees wholeheartedly, “John and I originally thought that we were going to write the songs and then hand them over to our arranger David Campbell. It turned out that we went a little deeper. We’re the kind of people who have all the tools, the synthesizers and the samplers, so we went ahead and created in the studio the parts we wanted the orchestra and choir to play, sort of like pre-arranging it. We work with this amazing person, David Campbell, who has so much experience in writing for orchestra, he does film work as well as working with many Rock bands – one of the ways we found him was through his work with Muse – and he was able to take what we gave him and flesh it out for the full orchestra and choir and add some of his own ideas in there. Beyond that, the logistics of making this album was actually getting the orchestra and the choir recorded, he helped with all that and fitting it in with the timeline and the budget, as well as getting the right players. David was instrumental in making this album really happen.”

Jordan is acutely aware that because of the orchestra adding to the grandiose parts, less synthesizers were needed than Dream Theater would usually use on an album. “The album is definitely heavy on acoustic keyboards,” he explains. “I play a lot of Hammond B3 organ and a beautiful nine foot Steinway grand piano. I just happened to find a studio here in New York that had both of those incredible instruments. My personal parts, especially live will be more focussed on those acoustic sounds, there’s some synth stuff too but there’s a lot of piano in the current set.”

In recent years the band’s shows have taken on the ‘An Evening With...’ format of two sets with an intermission, and no support band. It seems the album took on a life of its own in the construction, expanding to the length of a whole show on its own. “We didn’t realise when we started it but as soon as we got into it we realised that it was going to be something we’d want to present as a complete live show,” explains the keyboardist. “So to make it something that would stand up as a rock opera or a musical, call it what you will, we felt that it had to be a certain length. We wanted it to be a full statement so it very quickly moved from an album length project to being this beast, if you will. For me it was a great outlet musically. It was the first time that John and I have been able to sit in a room and really craft an album, it was great to do that after years of composing in a room full of people. For me that was very rewarding, I like to compose in a quiet space, and because of the nature of the album it also called for different elements of my musicality that wouldn’t ordinarily get used in Dream Theater. I think it expanded the styles we were writing in for both of us and create things that we normally wouldn’t bring to the table, so it definitely was a growing experience for us.”

The album is certainly a departure for Dream Theater and largely ignores the Metallic side of their writing, Rudess is certainly aware that he’s in a band who try not to repeat themselves. “Absolutely!” he states. “Ever since I’ve been in Dream Theater every album has had a conceptual start, not every album is a concept album of course, but we’ve always been very clear before we’ve started about what we’re setting out to do. I think that’s the really interesting things about Dream Theater and one of the reasons why Dream Theater is successful is that we make a plan, like this album is going to be one that harks back to the Progressive thing, or this one will be a bit more expressive and we’ll try new things, or we might set out to make one that’s heavier than the last few, it even gets more detailed than that. So we plan out what we want to do and we even plan out what we think the reaction is going to be, and then we set about trying to accomplish our goals, that’s a kind of working formula for us.”

The world tour will consist of playing the whole album, starting in London by the time you read this, surely the logistics of that must have been factored in when they were making the album? “We try not to think about it too much,” laughs Rudess. “Of course there has to be a little bit of thought because you don’t want to be taken totally off guard. When you’re in a studio environment you have all the tools available at your disposal, but we knew at the beginning, certainly from my own keyboard point of view I knew I would need organic acoustic instruments, so that helped me to plan. Our whole world tour is going to be about that, not just London but everywhere.”

Progressive bands seem to be lucky that they have fans who are receptive to an entire show of new music. Jordan agrees, “I think we’re very lucky. Dream Theater fans are open to a lot of different things, I think this show will be really unique and special, and it’s no secret, we’re saying that we’re coming out and playing The Astonishing from beginning to end, so come out and see the show. We’re so lucky that we do have that kind of an audience who are receptive. I know that tickets have been selling very nicely and we’re really looking forward to going out there and doing something different. We’ve had so many years on the road doing a regular show, it’s exciting to us to try something new and change things up a bit, it’ll be a blast.”

Their last concept album, Scenes From A Memory, was the turning point in their career where they stopped trying to please a label and made music for themselves, selling over a million copies in the process. The band are only too aware that The Astonishing could be a pivotal moment for them, but don’t seem unduly worried that the gamble may not pay off. “I’m just really excited about people hearing it, I think it’s some of our very best work,” states Rudess without a hint of smugness. “I think the story that John wrote and the music that we both wrote can take us into other areas, either for a film or for a real theatre piece. My hopes are that people love it and respond to it in the positive way that I hope they will. You never know what’ll happen when you put something out, here we are talking before the release of the album, but I think it’s a really special piece of work done with a lot of care and passion, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how people respond to it and where it can take us.”