David Prater interview (excerpt)

Moving on, and you worked with Dream Theater during a transitional period, on both ‘Images and Words’ [1992], and ‘A Change of Seasons’ [1995].

Well, it was two completely different organisms; the DNA was totally different. Most people do not realise that the reason the first record [‘Images and Words’] was successful, a lot of it had to do with [keyboardist] Kevin Moore. He was, without question, a devotee of song writing, in the classical sense. He didn’t just listen to Fate’s Warning and Symphony X and prog madness; he listened to a wide pallet of material, from a song writing standpoint. So you had a different sense of melodic structure, melodic phrasing, chord changes, and so on, so working with those songs was just a joy to be involved with because they took you somewhere compositionally, and, it was easier for me to be able to craft, essentially, the story line, sonically. I always wanted to leave them with a big grandiose ending on each composition if at all possible.

‘Change of Seasons’ could not have been more different. First of all, it was 22mins, 5 seconds for one song, and that would have been half of ‘Images and Words’ total running time. It was odd, for sure.

It was odd in terms of…?

Well, the material. Kevin was gone. Derek Sherinian had come in, and I knew Derek from working with Night Ranger. So we already kind of got on with each other because of that. He was a great player, a really accomplished musician, but from a compositional standpoint, I don’t think he was nearly as involved in that, as a writer, like Kevin Moore. He was really a very brute intellectual person. First of all, he was an amazing keyboardist. As far as his solos, I just think they’re wonderful; they’re unpredictable, and they’re pyrotechnic, they’re fiery. But working with Kevin I enjoyed, and I was really saddened when I heard he had decided to leave, because they were just at that point to where you just thought; “Oh my god, this is incredible; the sky’s the limit”. I never really did get the story line behind what exactly happened, but he was pretty uncompromising in what he wanted to do.

So you missed Kevin Moore’s input?

It was very different, and in all honesty, I don’t think that the quality of the writing, from a classical or traditional song writing standpoint, held up to the song writing of the first record. But I did everything that I could to try and make it that way.