John Petrucci interview

Graham Hartmann: The last time I talked to you I think was when the self-titled [album] came out, and you were describing your guitar tone as a mixture between chocolate cake and the T-rex from Jurassic Park. Where on that spectrum does this album fall?

JP: This is all T-rex. I mean chocolate cake is definitely rich and satisfying and decadent, but this one is all T-Rex.

GH: Immediately this thing comes at you with a fat tone. I mean I listen to it with my nice headphones today and it was killer on ‘Paralyzed.’ That fat tone just comes in. I know that you produce the record like you have for the last 20 years or so. How did you come up with this tone?

JP: Strictly speaking guitar, it’s actually very simple when it comes down to it. It’s my Ernie Ball/Music Man signature guitar. In the case of ‘Paralyzed,’ it’s a baritone; a baritone is an extended length guitar. The band Chevelle for example, a lot of their stuff is baritone, tuned down to B-flat, strings are really thick like cables. So it starts there and it goes into my signature Mesa/Boogie JP2C, which is a bonafide reissue of the Mark II C+ which is the famed Boogie that’s on Master of Puppets. Once you have that, that’s the tone. So that’s coming out of the speakers sounding incredible already.

GH: This record was made in – I don’t want to say like lavish circumstances – but very comfortable circumstances where you’re recording in a barn and you’re barbecuing and you’re with friends and it’s just kind of good vibes the whole time good. How is it that you work better in that situation, because a lot of musicians thrive under tension and pressure.

JP: For us it kind of it really worked that we were in this great atmosphere where the vibe was just so relaxed and cool. In fact like the barn and everything was on this this huge property, so it had really big windows in the control room, which is really rare, and also in the big live room. So you you’re actually watching the day turn from day to night; you look outside, you see at one point bears actually, deer, badgers... You’re in this really vibe-y, peaceful-like thing, where you’re in touch with your surroundings, and it just made the atmosphere I think even more conducive to being creative and everybody being really interactive and involved and invested; it was great. I know what you mean about like album’s done under like duress and pressure, maybe they come out a certain way, but this actually ended up being one of our more heavy records in a while now, so it wasn’t a detriment to that at all.

GH: What is a ‘Barstool Warrior’ exactly? What does that mean?

JP: So ‘Barstool Warrior’ is the one song on the record that I wrote from a fictional standpoint. I like storytelling; some of my favorite albums and artists are masters at that. I’m a big fan of Peter Gabriel and the stuff that he did with Genesis and his solo stuff. But when we wrote that song, it sounded very much like Rush, Genesis – it’s like old-school kind of prog. And I immediately had this weird thought of a townie guy in a little bar and a marina that was lamenting about his life going nowhere, trying to get out of it, coupled with a parallel story of a woman who’s in an abusive relationship and she’s like, “Why do I stay in this?” And the song, in a very short period of time, goes through they’re taking control of their lives and realizing they can decide what their destinies are gonna be, to get out of those situations. So that’s the headspace it comes from.

GH: Cool. You ever think about writing a book, like a work of fiction?

JP: Well with The Astonishing – the record before this – that was the closest, I wrote a full story that we based that record on, and then a novel was created off of that story by Peter Orullian. But to sit down at some point and write a full novel, now that would be an adventure.

GH: I think that one thing that will surprise people on this record is that Owen Wilson has a cameo on the song ‘S2N.’

JP: He does? Are you sure about that?

GH: About 4 minutes in. Is it Owen Wilson? I hear a “Wow!”

JP: If he was there, I was unaware.

GH: I think it’s a sample. I think it’s Owen Wilson like from the movie or something could be wrong. ‘S2N’ like 4 minutes in, a voice comes in and goes, “Wow!” What is that?

JP: I don’t know what that was. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe he visited the studio or something?

GH: I’m not crazy, right? I heard the “Wow!” [to someone off camera] You heard the “Wow!”? There’s a “Wow!” 4 minutes into that song.

JP: It’s a mystery. I’m not sure what’s going on there. [laughs]

GH: They’re looking at me like I’m nuts.

JP: You’re not nuts; I’m playing with you.

GH: OK, thank you. Is that Owen Wilson?

JP: I can’t say; I’m not at liberty to say.

GH: It’s a secret.

JP: Somebody was impressed with what we were doing at that point. I guess they were scratching their heads.

GH: They’re saying, “Wow!”

JP: Yeah, either that, or they hated it and they’re like, [shocked expression on his face] “Wow! That’s... really guys?” [laughs]

GH: So ‘Pale Blue Dot’ – if you’re not inspired by a guy like Carl Sagan then you don’t deserve to own a brain. What is it about him that influenced you in this record?

JP: Growing up, my dad was a big fan of Carl Sagan; we watched Cosmos together. It was a weird convergence of things that happened leading up to that subject matter – one having to do with the Voyager crew being given the honorary NYU degrees, like at my daughter’s NYU graduation. I was like, “That’s interesting.” And then I was watching a documentary on the Voyager missions with my other daughter, and it kind of was in my head, and then we wrote that song and it took this really sort of Interstellar, Star Wars path, and I said, “I know exactly what to write about.” But that whole speech that Carl Sagan gave about the earth being a ‘Pale Blue Dot’ from the Voyager photograph taken from the edge of the solar system looking back, this is real nerd stuff. They turned it around to look. They could barely even see what it was, and his reflection was like, “We should all really be a lot nicer to each other, because we’re just this little dot floating around in the universe. We don’t know if anybody’s out there. Who’s gonna save us from ourselves?” I thought it was a real poignant thing and very proggy.

GH: What is the first part that you wrote from [‘Metropolis part 1’]? Do you remember?

JP: Oh my God. I don’t know if I remember the first part.

GH: Where did it begin at least in your mind?

JP: Back in those days we were big fans of Queensrÿche and stuff like that, and the main riff that I’m doing on the guitar uses a sort of technique that they did with thirds and fifths and things like that. It’s a very sort of signature sound, so you hear that in the verses and stuff like that. That probably would be around some of the first stuff I gravitated towards on the guitar I bet.

GH: Gotcha. One of the pivotal moments in the song is when your tone shifts. Is it [an] acoustic 12-string?

JP: It’s actually not 12-string. The funny thing about that record and the way that we recorded it is some of the things that I did were not conventional. Like the clean guitar sound came out of a little Zoom portable guitar system that you can put on your strap and plug into it, and it had sounds. And the producer at the time was really into this thing. It’s like a consumer-level thing.

GH: I’ve seen people walking on the street playing a guitar with that on.

JP: I mean this was a long time ago and that’s where that sound came from.

GH: Wow, that’s so odd.

JP: It’s sorta weird.

GH: It sounds like a very beautiful clean like 12-string acoustic to me.

JP: I mean it’s possible we doubled it with acoustic; no 12-string though. But what we did do in those days – same with ‘Pull Me Under’ which had had that kind of signature sound – is we multi-tracked the clean part. And this was all to tape, not digital, so we would change the tape speed every time I did another overdub. In other words, it would create the difference in speed and performance [which] would create a natural chorus. So we did like six different overdubs of the same part, and then you get this like ‘Pull Me Under’ sound – this beautiful, chorusing sound. So it was the same sound on ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Take the Time,’ songs like that.

GH: Then later in the song, your tone gets very like old-school video game-y. It reminds me of the old Sega Genesis...

JP: ...which I’ve written music for.

GH: Sega Genesis?

JP: Sega Saturn. I wrote music. I wrote for a game called ‘Necronomicon.’

GH: Is that like an ‘Evil Dead’ game?

JP: I guess; I never actually played the game.

GH: So how did you go about getting of that kind of video game tone?

JP: I think it’s more like in the technique in the parts, because the tone is just a normal lead guitar sound. So I think it’s kind of like in the nature of the parts. There’s some things where we’d do dissonant harmonies where we’re playing like a minor second away from each other which gives like that weird sort of videogame thing. And also some of the faster, sort of bubbly like licks and things, kind of lends itself to more video game sounds. But the actual tone really is just a normal same lead sound I would use on the solo in ‘Pull Me Under’ or something. But when we were doing Scenes From a Memory, ‘Metropolis’ on Images always said ‘part 1,’ so we’re like, “It’s the perfect place for ‘part 2.’” So we very loosely tie it in the story to that. It was a stretch – we had to make some executive calls to make it make sense.

GH: Speaking of a stretch, I found one fan theory online that I’d like to throw by you to see if there’s any validity to it.

JP: Does it involve Owen Wilson?

GH: It does not – that was my theory. One person says that the song is structured to fit perfectly in between ‘Home’ and ‘Dance of Eternity.’ Apparently ‘Home’ goes right into it and then right into ‘Dance of Eternity,’ and apparently the theory was that that was the plan.

JP: If that was a plan, then we’re geniuses. You know what? Stuff like that is so interesting for me to hear because the fact that things work out that way, it’s just a weird coincidence. It definitely was not purposely done that way. But I love hearing about stuff like that.

GH: So I went on to Wikipedia today, looked at your page, Dream Theater, albums, songs, all that stuff. Pulled out some stuff – you can tell me if it’s fact or fiction and elaborate, if you don’t mind. First of all, because we always have to check, John Peter Petrucci, born in Long Island, NY.

JP: Yes that is correct.

GH: It says that you picked up the guitar at age eight because your older sister was allowed to go to bed later in order to practice the piano.

JP: Let me let me clarify that a little bit. The actual age, I’m not totally sure; it was in that zone. I was definitely young, before ten.

GH: So young enough to have a bedtime still.

JP: Yes, exactly. And my older sister played the organ. So she would take organ lessons at night, and I would be in bed by 7:00 or whatever, and I would hear her having these glorious lessons and I’d be like, “Man, this sucks! Why don’t I get to stay up late? She gets to stay up late!” You know how kids are. So my elaborate plan was, “I’ll play guitar; this way my lesson will be at night. I’ll show her!” but then my lesson was on Saturday during the day.

GH: That’s what it said – that you decided to quit when your attempts to stay up late were unsuccessful.

JP: They were, and honestly, I hated it. I had this guitar that was really hard to play. It might have been like that Hello Kitty one. The action was super high. This older man came in with a pitch pipe and a Mel Bay book, and I’m playing like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ I hated it. I was like, “This sucks. I’m not doing this.”

GH: It says that you picked up the guitar again at 12 and you committed yourself to practicing six hours a day when you discovered how much you really love the guitar.

JP: I did start when I was 12. I met John Myung shortly thereafter. We met in middle school and he was just like me – just obsessed with the bass. We made this pact where we had to practice six hours a day; that was our pact together. So back then, middle school going into high school and everything, there were a lot of parties; guys were like, “We’re going to the beach, we’re gonna hang out.” So John and I had the secret sort of thing that if we saw each other at that party, it would mean that we had put in our six hours. Like you would just see him and be like [nods to acknowledge]. Practice first. And if the guy wasn’t there, you’d be like, “He’s practicing.”

GH: I’m glad you brought up the thing about you and John practicing six hours a day, because on Wikipedia, it says that you started that six-hour practice rule once you started at Berklee.

JP: No. It was way before that.

GH: It was like middle school.

JP: Oh yeah.

GH: OK ‘Metropolis [part] 1’ was originally known as ‘Crumbling Metropolis’...

JP: That sounds about right.

GH: It said sometime around ‘89 ‘Crumbling’ was dropped; ‘part 1’ in the title was originally added by yourself as a joke as no sequel was ever intended at that time.

JP: [smiles] Well, we were huge Rush fans, and whenever you’d see a Rush song with ‘part 1’, it was like you gotta do it! So yeah, the ‘part 1’ was like...

GH: ...it was your inside Rush joke.

JP: It was. There wasn’t really intended to be another section.

GH: Gotcha. It wasn’t like, “Seven years later we’ll do ‘part 2.’”

JP: Exactly.

GH: It says that when Kevin Moore announced that he was leaving the band that you especially found the news very hard to take. That was a tough time?

JP: Absolutely. Kevin was my best friend growing up. Every guy probably has a friend that they just do everything with together. It’s like we literally did everything together. Our families were friends, we lived right around the corner from each other. So every day we were just hanging out, playing music, doing everything. Then obviously our band became successful, which was the dream we both had; we were touring, we had everything going for us. We were doing the Awake recording and he was like, “I’m gonna leave,” and I just was like devastated. I was like, “What?! I don’t understand.” So for me personally, it was very heartbreaking, because basically at that point he sort of disappeared and went on, did his own thing. We’ve been in touch very little and I haven’t actually talked to him in a long, long time. So it was basically the end of that longtime childhood relationship. It was tough.

GH: Moving on to the song ‘Misunderstood,’ it says you wrote and played the guitar solo, then reversed it, then you learned how to play the reverse version, after recording it you reversed it again. So that means like it was back to the beginning?

JP: It’s definitely reverse and live I have to mimic a reverse playing when I’m trying to play it. I’m gonna say I don’t really recall how we did that exactly. I’d have to listen to it again. I mean we might have just reversed it and that was it.

GH: If you reverse something twice that’s back where it began.

JP: That’d be kinda silly.

GH: So it would be kind of a pointless exercise.

JP: Right, exactly.

GH: So the Black Clouds album – ‘A Nightmare to Remember’ was based on a childhood car incident and ‘The Count of Tuscany’ was about an actual encounter in Tuscany.

JP: Yes, they’re both true.

GH: What happened in Tuscany? Did you get kidnapped or something?

JP: [laughs] It’s a long story. The concept lyrically behind the Black Clouds album was to write about real events that happened. ‘A Nightmare to Remember’ was about a car accident that my entire family was in that we all survived. My father was actually very badly injured, but it was a family car accident that was horrible.

‘The Count of Tuscany’ was an experience that I had with my good friend Mark Snyder who was my guitar tech and John Myung and another guy who is our current drum tech who was brand-new at that time. My buddy Mark is now a huge success in the wine business and owns Red Hook Winery in Brooklyn, the only winery in Brooklyn. He was interested in possibly working with this winery in Tuscany. He said, “Do you want to come to this castle with the count?” So this guy Sebastiano picked us up in his tiny little car, and we drove through the city in Florence. The first thing he said was that “we’re going to this castle, and oh yeah, just as an aside, if you know the Silence of the Lambs story, the sequel Hannibal where Anthony Hopkins’ character [is] playing the curator of this big library in Florence, and that was based on the count’s brother, on his life. It was like, “OK, that’s weird and scary.” So that was freaky.

We went to this castle, met the brother who was Italian but had an English accent, and was smoking a pipe and he was like this historian. We proceeded to have the most bizarre experience of our lives, the four of us, with all these like weird encounters at the castle with the brother. It was really freaky. There’s one room that we went into and they had these floor-to-ceiling wine barrels, and [as a] historian, he proceeded to tell us that during the war these soldiers would come in there to hide from the Germans. They’d go into the wine barrels and they’re still in there to this day. Just freaky things like that. So when I decided to write about real-life situations, I’m like, “I’m writing about that!” [laughs] So it’s a little weird, a little unconventional. Some people might think it’s hokey.

GH: No, that’s awesome. I like that. It says that ‘Wither’ is a ballad written about the process that you go through during the writing of the song.

JP: Yes. Here’s the funny thing: we talked about what people interpret, like the meaning, so I’ve had a lot of people say a lot of things, that they like the poetry of that song and the deep meaning and everything. Well when I was trying to come up with a subject matter for that particular song, I was talking to my wife and we were joking, talking about the Seinfeld episode where they write ‘It’s a show about nothing.’ So she was like, “Write a song about nothing,” and so that was my concept; I was writing a song about nothing. And it turned into the process that when you’re going to write music or lyrics or a story, there’s this point that you get to where you will you basically have nothing and you’re starting, your staring at a blank page or your holding your guitar or whatever, and the process that happens. So it’s not as deep as it sounds; it starts from a very funny place, but it turned out to be a really cool song.

GH: That’s almost like the least Dream Theater thing I’ve ever heard, to write a song about nothing. Last one: it says you are an avid fan of bodybuilding and dedicate much of your off time to weight training.

JP: I do. I’ve been doing that for many years, something I discovered a while back. I actually was in a skiing accident, which was scary, because as a kid I never skied. We decided once we had kids, we wanted to take them skiing and let them experience that. Of course as an adult, trying to learn how to ski... [shakes his head no] it was pretty bad. Skiing out here on the east coast where there’s a lot of ice and everything like that, I went tumbling down a mountain and dislocated my shoulder, and it was really awful. But I started rehabilitating that. I couldn’t move my arm at all, never mind lift anything.

GH: It’s a nightmare for a guitarist.

JP: Yeah. But fortunately, I recovered from that and decided to train. Then I got really, really into it and never looked back. It’s the type of thing where like makes you feel strong and healthy. You can go to do some sort of normal activity and not throw your back out. [laughs] Or hurt yourself.