Dream Theater –Weathering All Climates
By: Justin Donnelly
In June, long running act Dream Theater made their long awaited return to the scene with their tenth full-length effort Black Clouds & Silver Linings – an album that’s been hailed as another masterpiece for the New York-based progressive metal act.
In the lead-up to the band’s return to Australian shores (after making their debut visit here in January/February 2008), I caught up with keyboardist Jordan Rudess (who by his own account, was working on a rock ‘n’ roll schedule, and was awoken by the ringing of the phone just minutes prior) in Porto, Portugal to talk about the band’s upcoming dates, the climate within the music scene and how it relates to Dream Theater’s insular world, and the overall response to their latest magnum opus.
“The reaction from most people to Black Clouds & Silver Linings has been kind of interesting,” begins Rudess. “I think the album has a nice balance of all the elements that make up the Dream Theater sound. Some people have claimed that some of our albums have been too heavy, and then there have been some that are saying that we need a little more of this, or a little less of that. Of course, people are still saying the same things about this album, but I think this album is just that more balanced out in regards to having a bit of everything that we’re been known to put into our music, and people have been responding positively to that.”
In a recent chat I had with vocalist James LaBrie, he claimed that while many believed that Black Clouds & Silver Linings was the band’s strongest release in many years, he was at a loss to pinpoint just what it was that many had felt give the album something the others didn’t. When asked the same question, Rudess too is a little lost pinning the album’s success to any one particular thing.
“This album was kind of conceived in a similar way to our last album Systematic Chaos (2007), in a sense that we went into the studio with a fresh, kind of open plate frame of mind. There were no real preconceived ideas stylistically prior to heading into the studio. We just wanted to get in there and write some really good Dream Theater music. So that helps in a way to open things up stylistically to whatever comes kind of comes in. That’s not to say that the output is going to sound hodgepodge like. What it means is that we were a little more in a clearer and freer state of mind to write our music. So that’s what this album was kind of all about.
“Things didn’t actually become any more defined about what we wanted to create until we had created a bunch of it,” he continues. “So as things were coming together, it was only then that we could see where we needed a little more of this, and a little less of that. For instance, if we felt that we were leaning a little too much on the heavier side of things, then we would focus a little more on writing some quieter and more atmospheric stuff to balance things out. We needed a ballad to help rectify that balance, so we wrote a ballad. I think that way of working really worked for us on this album. I also thought that Systematic Chaos was a really great album. But I guess it goes to show that you can never really know what’s going to totally hit with people.”
Drummer Mike Portnoy is well known for being the driving force behind Dream Theater. But in terms of creativity, and particularly when it came to putting together Black Clouds & Silver Linings, Dream Theater is driven creatively in the musical sense by three individuals within the band.
“Sometimes in the past, the guys might come in with a particular concept that they want to pursue. No so much as a concept album kind of idea, but more of an overall concept in terms of how they want the album to feel and sound. A lot of those ideas can come from Portnoy or John Petrucci [guitars]. They’re always cooking up something. If there’s going to be a direction, they’ll generally propose it. But on these last couple of albums, that didn’t really happen. Portnoy is definitely a driving force within the band. He does things like devising the set lists for each show when we go out and play and he’ll come up with other ideas, like the ‘Progressive Nation’ tours we’ve been undertaking for the last couple of years. He’ll figure out which bands we’ll take out with us, and take charge of organising everything based around that. The rest of us don’t have much to do with that side of things.
“But at the other end, when it comes to writing the music, then it really comes down to me, Portnoy and Petrucci. And it’s really the three of us that write the music for Dream Theater, especially in Systematic Chaos and Black Clouds & Silver Linings. It was really just the three of us. Nobody else really had anything to do with it. Portnoy kind of takes it from there, and ensures that all the other stages come through as the producer of the album we all start to do the tracking. That’s when everyone else starts to do their thing. John Myung (Bass) will come down and lays down his parts, and then LaBrie puts his finishing touches to everything.”
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