James LaBrie interview (excerpt)

Kyle Meredith: Congratulations on A View From the Top of the World. What a powerful record you guys have put out.

James LaBrie: Thank you. Yeah, we’re pretty excited and the feedback so far from the fans has been overwhelmingly positive, so we’re pretty psyched. I guess the only thing to follow it up now is to get out there and start touring again, which we have every intention, starting in February.

KM: I know part of the story is because the pandemic, you had to work on this a lot separately at first. How did that affect how you approached it, and how much of what was happening around us actually played into... even in the lyrics that you were writing?

JL: Fortunately for us we have our own studio; it’s called ‘Dream Theater Headquarters.’ We started this big warehouse, and we renovated the whole front half of the warehouse into this state-of-the-art studio with full-on living room, a board room, a kitchen, a maintenance room and the control room – the engineers room – where we record all the stuff. We have a room where the band sets up, and that’s where we do our writing and our rehearsing and so on and so forth. I think that was very, very crucial to why we were able to go on during the pandemic and get together. Even though all of us we had been vaccinated fully vaccinated, we didn’t have to worry about going into a building where there would be several people coming in and out; it’s our studio, so it was basically the band and our production assistant Maddi Schieferstein – who’s also John’s guitar tech – and James Meslin – who was our engineer – who recorded it.

That being said, I stayed up in Canada and I was patched in via Zoom and they were patched into me in my studio in my house, so I had all their instruments cranking through my speakers in my studio and vice versa. They had me on a great big monitor screen so they could hear me and see me, and I could contribute and be involved in the writing as well. Because I live in Canada, the whole idea of me going back and forth in the states at the time that we wanted to start, which was a year ago October, was just practically impossible; it was just so difficult. But we made it work. The important thing was the four instrumentalists were able to be in the same room, which is imperative to anything like this – you have to be able to feed off each other, there’s that physical connection, there’s that chemistry – and for the five of us to have been patched in via Zoom would have been just discombobulated.

KM: It’s worlds ahead of what we were all capable of doing, even when you started in Dream Theater 30 years ago. I was thinking about the technology and the age that we’re in, and I start looking at the song [‘The Alien’] and think of how we’re also in a renewed space age – not just a technology age – but because of technology, a new space age. I listened to that song through that lens; what part does it play for you in that song specifically?

JL: Are you talking lyrically or...?

KM: I’m talking lyrically.

JL: Well lyrically, my son turned me on to a podcast that Joe Rogan had done with Elon Musk. Musk was talking about Mars exploration and terraforming, and the only way [the human species is] going to be infinite and go on to survive is if we start thinking outside of this planet because eventually, we’re going to outgrow it or strip it of all its other resources. We’re kind of a destructive species, aren’t we? [laughs] Anyway, it was a three-hour podcast, and I listened to it, and I was extremely inspired at the moment, so I did a ton of jot notes. This was actually the first song that we wrote for the album, ‘The Alien,’ and I knew that I wanted to do that. I just knew that I wanted to do the lyric. That song just has a very spacey, almost movie soundtrack kind of feel to me. And so, I just thought of something that was more sci-fi. But instead, we become the aliens, and we were out there in the universe terraforming, and maybe other planets that are inhabited already would see us as we see or as we think when we think of aliens.

KM: But even in a song like that, there is a chance for continued life for all of us, and that’s something interesting because there is a lot of darkness around, and there is a lot of dark songs being written. Something from you all – even on the darker songs – there ends up being light at the end of the tunnel. There always seems to be hope with what you all put out. Where does that come from?

JL: Well, I think you just said it yourself. The fact is, aren’t we inundated enough with all the freaking negativity and the darkness, and then people want to perpetuate that and write about it in lyrics? And the other thing is, when John Petrucci and I sat down before going in to write the lyrics, the one thing we made evidently clear from the very beginning is we are not writing lyrics about this pandemic. Enough artists, I’m pretty damn sure, are going to do that, so let’s let that befall onto them. And we just said, “Let’s write what we think.” It has to have some significance to us, personally, and that’s where I’ve always come from; it has to be something that I’m motivated by or inspired by at that time. We always, within our lyric, want everyone to see at some point the human spirit, and that we can rise above anything, transcend any negativity, that we are extremely resilient. We have to believe in that, and if enough of us believe in it, then it’ll be a better place for all of us to live.