John Petrucci interview

Rodrigo Altaf: Let’s talk about your solo album Terminal Velocity which was released digitally last Friday. Are you happy with the reaction so far?

John Petrucci: I am very happy. The response has been incredibly positive. People seem happy and excited, and seem to really like the music. So it was a great, great release day. It’s been a great few days to see that and I’m very, very thankful and grateful to everybody for all the nice comments. It’s really been fun.

RA: This time you worked for a few months on the album as opposed to your first one, Suspended Animation, where there were stops and starts. Do you feel that played a part in how the album came out in some way?

JP: I think so. For me, I much prefer doing something from beginning to end, being able to focus on it and get the consistency of all the sounds. Not be distracted by other things and have to stop and start. I think it definitely helped the album. I think it helped the sound and production of the album. I think it helped the flow of the writing, not to have to interrupt it that way, so yeah I think it definitely did. I think it had a positive effect.

RA: From my perspective at least, these songs on Terminal Velocity feel more like they’re part of a bigger picture than the ones on Suspended Animation even though some of them have appeared in your setlist before with G3, like ‘Glassy-Eyed Zombies’ for example, and ‘Happy Song’ which was called ‘Cloud Ten,’ right?

JP: Yes it was. I changed the name. [laughs]

RA: There’s another song you played on those G3 shows called ‘Zero Tolerance’ which you didn’t record this time. Was it not a good fit for the rest of the material, are you saving it for something else or...?

JP: I reviewed that song and I just didn’t feel like it was strong enough. I don’t know. That’s just my own personal opinion about it. I thought the other material was stronger, plus I wanted to write a bunch of new stuff, and so if I put that one on then it would have been five [old] songs. I don’t know. I just wanted to write some new stuff so I just thought out of all of the older stuff, that was not the strongest so I decided to leave it off. What made me feel that way was when I actually played it live on G3, the vibe to me wasn’t as strong. When I played ‘Glassy-Eyed,’ I felt this audience vibe, and with ‘Zero Tolerance,’ it was like, “Eh. It’s OK.” I don’t know – just it wasn’t as cool.

RA: All right – makes sense. There’s another one that is an old tune which is called ‘Gemini’ which we know from your DVD Rock Discipline and I’m glad you finally did a fully recorded version of that song for us to enjoy. It does fit well with the rest of the songs, don’t you think?

JP: I do. I was a little bit worried about it because it was written so long ago and stylistically it’s very different than the newer material. It’s more of a guitar demo-ish kind of song, so when I listen to it, it sounds a little bit immature in the writing style, it’s not as cohesive as the other the new music. But maybe that’s cool, maybe that’s something that people like. I was a lot younger then, and I was doing guitar clinics and needed some sort of demo tracks so I could play. So that’s what it sounds like to me, but I tried to modernize it and make it cool.

RA: Do you feel that way when you bring songs from When Dream and Day Unite into the set, and you look back and you go, “Oh, what was I thinking?”

JP: [laughs] A little bit, yeah. I think When Dream and Day Unite... a lot of people might not have even heard some of the original Majesty demos we did, and some of the old songs. Yeah, I get that feeling. I cringe. It sounds like little kids trying to write music. But I think as of Images and Words, I started to feel more, like, even when I play those songs snow, they still stand up. When Dream and Day Unite has a little bit of that immaturity vibe to me.

RA: Tell me about ‘Temple of Circadia,’ which in my mind is the one that will please Dream Theater fans the most. What exactly is “Circadia”?

JP: I was thinking, you know the term ‘Circadian rhythm’? Like, your sleep cycle. I don’t even know if ‘Circadia’ is a word, but I just thought it was be cool. [laughs]

RA: Is there some sort of motif that repeats itself during the song, like a riff?

JP: The melody in that song was something I had written that repeats a couple of times that I thought was pretty strong – the main opening riff does reoccur a few times. I think stylistically you’re right, that song was written on a seven-string, I could picture that fitting in with the Dream Theater catalog. If there were vocals and keyboards, it probably would sound like a Dream Theater song – it kind of has that more metal/prog thing going on. Yeah, that’s probably one of those on the album that are more Dream Theater-sounding, for sure. But it’s funny how it takes on a new light when it’s only guitar, bass, and drums. And I can steer it in the direction of the solo album just by the orchestration, the way that I’m playing guitar on it, the way the guitar is playing all the melodies instead of the vocals, the way the guitar is playing all the solos instead of sharing them, things like that.

RA: ‘Snake in My Boot,’ for me, I think it’s a personal favorite of mine. It’s designed to be played live, right with the clapping and everything?

JP: Yeah, it’s funny because some of the songs that I almost took a little lighter – like ‘Out of the Blue’ and ‘Snake in My Boot’ – they’re turning out to be favorites of people, and those are the most fun kind of songs for me. A while back, I had this idea that it would be really cool to get the audience doing some sort of pattern, and then just playing guitar to that pattern. My original idea is that it would just be a single guitar and no other instruments, but we developed it more than that. But for the most part, it is just one guitar throughout. I mean it plays all the rhythm, then it shifts to the solos and it goes back to the rhythm – there’s not really layers of rhythm guitars and stuff like that– it’s just meant to be a lot like you said: a live interactive thing. You could play by the campfire.

RA: I think the idea was to distance yourself from Dream Theater sonically to a certain extent. Were there moments where you wrote something for the album and you thought, “No, this is too Dream Theater-esque, let’s leave it behind”?

JP: Well, I have a funny story about that, actually. All the time, I collect different song ideas and seeds, and things that I’ll use later – I organize them, I use some of that stuff with Dream Theater and some of the stuff with my solo album. One day in the studio, I had written this whole section of music – spent most of the day working on it, and thought it was really, really cool, and came in the next day, and something was bothering me about it. I’m like, “This sounds really familiar.” We’d really worked on it – me and my engineer – programmed the drums, and I’m like, “I can almost picture keyboards over this. Something is really bothering me.” And then it clicked that I had rewritten an older Dream Theater song because I forgot to delete the song idea from my collection of ideas. [laughs]

RA: So that must happen a lot...

JP: It doesn’t happen a lot, thankfully, no. It does not happen a lot, but it was a full wasted day of rewriting a song that I wrote before, so it was pretty funny. You have to laugh – it was a good exercise. [laughs]

RA: The album cover is kind of a natural sequel to Suspended Animation, and it has I think a common theme with Distance Over Time, the latest Dream Theater album, and it’s the notion of man versus machine. Was that deliberate and did you think of it in those terms or not really?

JP: There’s three different artists on the three releases you mentioned. The original Suspended Animation was one artist, Hugh Syme is the artist for Distance Over Time, and Sean Moser Smith is the artist for Terminal Velocity. When I when I hired Sean to do this, he knew that it was my solo album. Obviously he saw the original album cover. I told him I wasn’t looking for something in the direction of what Dream Theater does with the sort of more surrealist photography. I wanted something colorful, I wanted something unique to this. He presented a few different covers and this one immediately along with the title of the record kind of felt like a companion. When you put them side by side, they look like they make sense – the titles, the looks. One is more white, one’s more black, and they’re both colorful and they kind of just work together. They look like the yin and yang of albums.

RA: One choice I thought was quite unusual was Andy Sneap who’s famous for his work with more traditional metal bands like Judas Priest, Accept, Testament. How did you reach the conclusion that he’d be a good fit to mix the album?

JP: I’ve been a fan of his as a mixer. I think he’s an incredible mixer. He is a guitar player, he gets it. My wife and I saw him – I met him for the first time – we saw Judas Priest and so we saw Andy play with Priest, and started talking to him through email then just about nothing – just sharing photos from the night. This is a guitar centric album, most of the material is pretty heavy, and so I thought, “Andy [would] do a killer job on this!” And I wasn’t wrong – I love what he did. He did a really great job. He’s just so good. He’s great with guitars obviously, all instruments: drums, bass. But it’s the clarity on this record, the way that he makes the rhythm guitars speak in one way, which is a very sort of three-dimensional... they have a lot of aggression and hair to them, they really stand out, and then the lead guitars are have a very vocal sound. So he did a phenomenal job. So happy to work with him for the first time.

RA: I think the elephant in the room on pretty much all interviews I saw about the album is the fact that you and Mike Portnoy are playing together again. He played drums on the album. For us fans, it’s a joy of course to see you both working together. We saw the pictures and the teasers and the videos and so on. Did you have any concerns about this being the main topic of conversation and not the album itself?

JP: Totally! That’s exactly what was my concern. I was like, “That’s definitely going to happen. The conversation might be more about Mike and I playing together and less about the music.” So I was a little concerned about that. But at the end of the day – I’ve said this before – I wrote this between March and May, and I live in New York and it’s just like full-on pandemic in the US – and just woke up one morning like, “Ah, life’s too short. What am I worried about? So what if people talk?” It turned out to be a really cool thing actually because there’s a lot of positivity behind that decision. Like you said, fans’ reaction was that they were so happy to see us playing together, so that infused an element of joy to the project. I always put pressure on myself like, “I have to deliver the goods no matter who’s playing on the record. This has my name on it. I haven’t done an album in 15 years. I can’t come out with a piece of crap! [laughs] It better be good!” So I focus on the material, the sound and like you said using Andy, and so I knew that even if it got different type of hype or attention because of Mike, that the material would live up to that hopefully. So I felt confident. And like I said, at the end of the day it’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Life’s too short. Let’s have some fun.” And I’m glad I did it. Mike did a killer job, as did Dave. Two amazing musicians – I’m so lucky to be able to play with them.

RA: Dave, to be honest, I think he’s the unsung hero of bass in prog and prog metal. He doesn’t have enough credit, he should be in higher echelons.

JP: I totally agree with you. He’s such an incredible musician. First of all, his ability on the bass, as a bass player, is amazing to watch and to listen to. But he’s just so musical. I’ve played so many shows with him on G3. Just being on stage with the guy, he’s like the consummate professional. He never drops a beat. He’s just unbelievable as a musician, so I agree, we need more recognition for Dave LaRue out there.

RA: Speaking of Mike again, he has alluded to Liquid Tension being a possibility in the future. Jordan has spoken about it briefly as well. Is there some sort of plan or can you reveal anything, or is there a chance like...?

JP: I can’t say anything. [laughs]

RA: OK. Alright, and we’ll leave it. [laughs]

JP: We’ll leave it at that. [laughs]

RA: Fair enough. Speaking of future plans, it was just announced that Dream Theater will record a new album in the fall. When you start doing this, do you have anything written beforehand? Do you bring stuff or do you start from scratch? What’s the philosophy there?

JP: With Dream Theater, what we like to do most of the time is have a collective type of writing. We’re all in the same room, and even if guys bring in ideas, it’s more like we sort of play the idea and everybody joins in and we bounce it off of each other, and that’s how the songs are written. So it’s always good to have some of those seeds that we talked about earlier – some places to go. Whether you use them or not – you don’t have to use them – but they’re good starting points. So we’ll always come in with something. And what we’ll usually do, which is really helpful too, is we’ll discuss prior to those sessions, the type of record we wanna make, which I think is really important. We have a long career, and we have a large catalog. We try to look at each album as being another chapter in our story, so when we approach a new album, we try to do something that’s unique and that might just make things more interesting. Why do people want to keep listening to Dream Theater or wanna get the new record if there’s not anything new or different or exciting about it? So, we’ll discuss that beforehand so that everybody can be on the same wavelength and so, “What are we trying to do here?” As opposed to just walking in, like, “All right. What do you wanna do?” “I don’t know. What do you wanna do?”

RA: At this point in your career, do you feel there’s still something to conquer? You did concept albums, you played with orchestras, acoustic shows, played albums in fall. What keeps the fire in these five guys that make Dream Theater today?

JP: I do. I definitely think there’s still a ton to conquer. There’s always another idea. You wake up one day and you’re like, “Oh, you know what would be really cool? If we did this or we tried that.” Sometimes it could have to do with stylistic decisions, sometimes it could have to do with production choices and decisions or direction. Like, “We’ve never made a record like this. Let’s try that.” In the case of Distance Over Time, it had more to do with how we went about it. All the guys going away together and just being isolated. We never did that before. Sometimes it’s about that and you try to make it fun and interesting and cool and unique. Ultimately you try to feel good about it so that when it comes out, you’re proud of it.

RA: One curiosity I have as a fan is you guys used to talk a lot about “What would Rush do?” when it comes to making decisions. Can you give me an example of where that rationale was employed maybe musically or managing the career?

JP: A good example is, and it’s a little bit unfair, because we use the same artist as Rush used, Hugh Syme. He’s done most of Dream Theater’s album covers, and he’s done all of the Rush album covers, but that’s a good example. I was always impressed when they put out an album, everything is centered around the art of that record. Not only the album – their merchandise, their advertising campaign, if you want to call it that... When you went to the show, the tour program, the look of the stage set – everything was very much in the same aesthetic of the album art. And a band like Iron Maiden does the same thing; Metallica does the same thing. It’s like you’re welcoming people into this world that you created, and we really did that to the furthest degree with The Astonishing. So that is definitely one of those, “What would Rush do?” because they were the kings at doing that. When you walked into a Rush show, you saw all the T-shirts of the concert that you’re going to, you pick up the program, the program was all centered around the tour that you were going to. And you looked on stage, and the video and the light show on the stage, everything had to do with the concept. If it was Presto, if it was Signals, if it was whatever – it had to do with that album. Again, Iron Maiden, total kings of doing that same thing. So that’s a good example of that: keeping consistency in the artistic presentation.

RA: Let me talk about a trick that you do on guitar which is present on pretty much every DT album when you repeat the main melody of the song on an ending solo. For example on ‘Octavarium,’ on ‘Pale Blue Dot’ you do that. It’s a great way to stress and stretch the melody and to get the song engrained the brain of the fans. Could you talk a little bit about that?

JP: Those are some of my favorite moments, honestly. As a guitar player, first of all, it’s one of the best writing instruments, so it’s always fun to write music on guitar – it just comes so naturally. It’s fun to shred and play solos and improvise – that’s sort of like driving a fast car. But the moments that you’re talking about where the guitar is the melody king, and it’s soaring and driving that melody, like on ‘At Wits’ End’ off of Distance Over Time does that same thing – that’s some of my favorite moments ever to play. I can’t explain, it’s incredibly rewarding just artistically, creatively. It’s fun as far as being a guitar player and manipulating the notes to be as emotional as possible. And it’s a good writing technique I think, because it almost harkens back to a more symphonic style where you’re stating these big melodies that maybe have been hinted at, but then you’re sort of like taking it home at the end, and it gives a sort of a cinematic vibe as well. All that sort of John Williams stuff and Hans Zimmer – that stuff is all about that – those big, big melodies that cause you to cry or get emotional or remember that part of the movie or whatever. So as a guitar player, those are some of my favorite moments to play all the time, I will always be the guy to take that role. [laughs]

RA: Last question for me: now that you have almost two hours’ worth of solo material, do you see yourself presenting these songs on a different setting than the G3 tours?

JP: I can now. I never really had enough material to do a whole tour with, so we’ll see. Obviously the world is in a very different place, strange place – we’re not sure what’s gonna happen with live music or when. We’re all hoping for the best. When that does get to a point, other than Dream Theater touring plans which are always really busy, if something should come up like the opportunity to do some kind of solo run now, now I have some catalog. Now I can play a whole show.