Originally published in WBAB · October 2019
John Petrucci interview (excerpts)
InterviewJohn Petrucci5 min read
need BM link
(audio downloaded but not in iTunes)
Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci spoke to Fingers of the WBAB 102.3 radio station about the commercial success of the band’s latest album, “Distance Over Time”, which landed at the No. 5 on the Top Current Album chart and debuted at No. 24 on the Billboard 200.
“It’s really crazy,” Petrucci said. “We’ve been fortunate enough to have had a long career. And we work really hard – we get out there and we tour and we spread the word. It’s really interesting – the album not only in the U.S. did really well, but also all over the world. It was our first No. 1 in Germany, which was really interesting. And I believe it was No. 5 on the rock charts on Billboard.
“It’s interesting the way that that part of the industry keeps changing, because when we released ‘Images And Words’ back in the early ‘90s, in order to chart, you had to sell millions of records,” he continued. “Then eventually it kind of dropped off. And we were charting Top 10 very easily, because you only had to sell tens of thousands of records, or hundreds of thousands, to chart Top 10. But now, recently, it changed again. Now they’re including streaming [data when compiling the charts], so all of the Drakes and Ariana Grandes, where there’s millions and millions of streams that’s included in Billboard. So now it’s hard again to chart Top 10. So it keeps kind of going back and forth. But we are incredibly grateful for what we’ve been able to accomplish.”
Asked about the record’s lead single and opening track, “Untethered Angel,” John replied:
Yeah, one of the things that we did in the studio is my guitar tech Maddi [Schieferstein], he brought in pretty much every different tuning that I have, as far as guitars are concerned. And depending on which direction we were going, I was able to grab the 7-string or a D-tuned guitar, or standard, or drop-D, or C, or whatever - even Baritone - and write the song. And John [Myung] would come in with this riff on the bass. He kind of, like, had a Tool sort of vibe, and immediately I thought, ‘What if we just dropped that down a couple of keys and I use a C-tuned guitar and made the riff heavier on the lower strings?’ So that’s turned into that opening riff, and kind of just pushed the song in that direction. Yeah, lyrically, I wrote it. I find that a lot of young people, a lot of young adults when they’re sort of facing the world, either fresh out of college or late in high-school, there’s a lot of trepidation, there’s a lot of fear, I’m not sure what that’s fueled by, could be social media, could be the internet... I just remember being in that age, and just having no fear, just getting out there and doing it, you know. I’d love to see that more in young people today, there’s a lot of things that are holding them back, it seems.
‘Paralyzed’ is the second track on the album, and one of the things about that song is it’s about four and a half minutes into the song, there’s a lead fill, I’m trying to figure out if it’s you on the guitar or Jordan [Rudess] on the keys or is it you playing the guitar through the keys.
Well, the only solo in that song is on the guitar. This was a very collective experience, so in this case [drummer Mike] Mangini had brought an idea for a riff, and he had played it from his laptop and I said, ‘Let me grab my baritone guitar.’ That guitar is tuned to B-flat, it’s way low. It sort of kind of manipulated the notes to be kind of more ethnic, and turned it into this really cool groove, heavy riff, and that became one of the singles that we are pushing, and yeah, that one rocks, a lot of fun to play live.
We have ‘Barstool Warrior,’ which I’m curious, is that written about a specific person?
It’s not about a specific person. The funny thing is that when we announced the song titles, everybody freaked out about that name... It’s funny, we wrote that song in the style of a lot of our prog, you know, favorite bands: Genesis, Yes... As a joke, as we were humming out some melodies, they started to sing make-up lyrics, I just pictured, like, an old county guy and because I’m from Long Island, like, it’s a marina bar, maybe it’s the piano man... There’s another part to that story about a woman who is in an abusive relationship and she can’t get out, the whole theme is sort of, like, people that are stuck in situations and they sort-of have the power to turn that around. The interesting thing about that is that we actually have a Dream Theater beer now that’s called Barstool Warrior. We thought that would be the perfect name; great-tasting beer, and we just went to Hawaii, so that’s perfect.
So, track 5, what is in ‘Room 137’?
Okay. So, again, Mike getting more involved this time around, and we had written that song in a field that’s a bit different for Dream Theater, has a bit of a swing to it, 7-string kind of heavy. We were talking about the tempo, what should the tempo be, so he’s, like, ‘How about 137 beats per minute?’ - really specific. But then he started to tell us about the significance of 137. It’s a long story, but to make it short, a mathematician named Wolfgang Pauli who was obsessed with this number, how it kind of repeats itself in the universe. He got really freaked out trying to figure out the origins and why... He ended up dying, ironically, in a hospital room number 137. Mike ended up telling us that story, and then couple months later he’s, like, ‘Oh, I wrote lyrics to that.’ So it was actually his first lyrical contribution after being in the band for now almost 10 years.
Following ‘Room 137’ is ‘S2N’...
‘S2N,’ which stands for ‘Signal-To-Noise,’ the funny story about that song, it starts with a bass, so John Myung from the very beginning, from the first day in the studio, he had this riff and we jammed on his bass riff. And the idea that we were jamming on turned into something completely different, where we abandoned his bass riff and just went with where the song was going, and this must have happened about four or five times. We were trying to play this riff, it was turning into a different song, we were, like, ‘Don’t worry, John, we’ll get to that.’ So eventually, when we had written all nine songs on the record, we were going to write one more, and we’re, like, ‘Alright, John, we’re going to use that. We promised, we’ll see it through.’ And that’s what we did. So that song is basically John’s riff and another one co-written lyrics that you’ll see there. It was a full band collaboration, which is really cool.