James LaBrie, John Petrucci interview (excerpt)

CJ: You have such diehard fans that it’s almost like – when you don’t play ‘Pull Me Under,’ it’s like when Iron Maiden doesn’t play ‘Run to the Hills’.

JL: I know, it’s incredible. I can only imagine what those fans feel like. It’s like, “Well, what about my new stuff?” “No, we don’t give a shit, just play that!” – you know? It’s got to be a little frustrating. For me personally, it’s like, “Oh my god, here we go, we’re gonna play ‘Pull Me Under’ again...” But once you get into that moment, you’re fully engaged, or at least that’s the way it works with me. Even though you played it a thousand times, once you get into it, you realize that it has such a great vibe and great energy, and you once again are hitting it like the first time you sang it or played it live. It’s bizarre in that sense – you would think you would’ve hated it and dreaded it the whole time through, but it’s not the case.

JP: You’re also assuming when you don’t play those songs, your hits or whatever, but the most-known ones, you’re assuming that the whole audience there has seen you multiple times and there are die-hard Dream Theater fans that don’t want you to play it... But that’s not the case, usually. It’s usually a mix of people who never saw the band before and young people, kids. It’s, like, they want to see that song. I do relate to that. You can’t just assume that everybody’s a complete Dream Theater-head that only wants to hear the rare B-sides. In fact, on one of the tours, we broke out the song that we never played live before. It was like, “This is going to be awesome, people are going to love this!” And it was, like, crickets – because nobody knew the songs. The two people that did were freaking out... So you do have to look at the bigger picture of the show and the audience that’s attending. So I do relate to it; it’s like, “Yeah, I want to see those songs, for sure.”

How was it playing with Mike again?

JP: It was great, it was really great. I’m really happy that he did the record, he did such a great job. I wish we could’ve really played together, because of the pandemic situation, I wrote the record and recorded all of the guitars first, and then Mike and Dave played to that. So, unfortunately, we didn’t really get to jam the record together, but he was able to come up to my studio and track the drums with me there. So we did that, we had some interaction, we were able to work our parts, have feedback and stuff. We had a fun week, about six days here in New York, and it was really cool. It was the first thing we did musically together, obviously, since 10 years ago. So it was great; he was really easy-going, and he did a killer job – both him and Dave.

What’s your favorite song to play live?

JP: Just kind of focusing on the new DVD – in the first set, ‘Barstool Warrior’ is always a fun song, that’s a new one, off of ‘Distance Over Time.’ This song has fun guitar moments for me, the middle section guitar solo is just kind of an emotional point. As far as ‘Scenes,’ there are certainly songs there that are fun as far as a guitar player. The one song is ‘Through Her Eyes’ – it’s a moment in the show where the whole band kind of comes down, it’s basically an acoustic vocal type of thing, there’s other orchestration there. But what we did with the video – and I thought this was a real-poignant moment of the show for people that were there – is, in the story, it has to do with the main character visiting the grave of his past-life counterpart and kind of coming to this realization. So, we have an animation of a cemetery scene and what the video artist Wayne Joyner did is put names of our fallen musicians on the tombstones. So as that very emotional music is playing, you see Zappa, you see Emerson, Cornell, Rhoads, you see Burton... If it would’ve been now, you’d see Van Halen, Peart. In fact, when Neil passed away, I immediately was on the phone with Wayne and he added Peart to one of the tombstones. It might’ve been the next day, and it was such an emotional... I’m getting the chills just thinking about it. As we’re playing that very beautiful song – very introspective song lyrically – the tombstones are being shown and you see Peart, I mean, there was such an uproar from the crowd... So that was fun; when I say ‘fun,’ I mean it was a memorable moment of the ‘Scenes’ show, so people can see that a bit on the DVD.