Intervista Dream Theater (Jordan Rudess)

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Hi Jordan, how is it going?

It’s going pretty well, how are you?

I’m well, thanks.
If I’m not mistaken you’ve just come back from the NAMM show, how did it go?

Yeah, it was crazy like it always is for me because I’m very involved in all the tech companies, you know.

Let’s start talking about the new album, “Distance Over Time”: I’ve just listened to it this morning for the first time, and it sounds much heavier than its predecessor.
Is it a kind of reaction to “The Astonishing”, you wanted to go in a radically different direction with the new album?

Yeah, we wanted to get back to a more core kind of a sound.
“The Astonishing” was obviously a departure, an experiment of sorts and with this album we were like, “Okay, time to return to the roots”.

Also looking at the length of the songs this looks different, it’s gonna be a quite short album compared to your standards.
This is the band’s shortest album since “When Dream and Day Unite”, so the shortest Dream Theater album you ever worked on. How did that happen? Did you want to have a more concentrated album, so to say?

We did, we wanted a short album, a substantial album, of course a good amount of music, but we wanted to definitely make the sound focused and channel all of the energy we were trying to create.
From that point of view it didn’t have to be an overblown, long album.

As for the songwriting, with “The Astonishing” you and John Petrucci worked on your own on all the music; was it a more organic process this time around?

Yeah, the process was different this time, we were in a room with everybody, the entire band.
We kind of opened the doors, if you will, to everybody’s input, like for example Mike Mangini was very active, had a lot of ideas, and that was very cool to have him there.
It was the most input he had in the writing process since he joined, it was really fun to have his input.
So, yeah, it was a return to the way we worked in the past.

In a previous interview one of you guys said that the album was composed in just 18 days. Did you start from scratch, or did you already have some drafts and ideas?

We wrote a lot of this in that short amount of time, we were very inspired and we were in that sort of environment which was very quiet and helped us.
But we had some riffs, some things that we came up during soundchecks while we were on the road, not that many, but we had some things that we were able to call upon which is always helpful.

Does it ever happen that you write music but decide to leave it on the side and maybe record it for a later album?

Occasionally, sometimes I have ideas around the time that I’m writing for Dream Theater, but maybe I, or somebody else, feel that it’s not right for this particular album.
Not every idea that comes out of anybody’s head is gonna be part of the album.

With ‘Room 137’ we have the first Dream Theater lyrics by Mike Mangini.
How did that go, exactly? Like, the other members of the band asked him to write something, he asked to do it or what?

Mike was really inspired, he wanted to write something, he had a real desire to write some lyrics for the band, and he had this concept with various numbers and the quantum theory…you know, that topic of mathematics and mysticism and he wanted to write this story, so that’s what that is about.

I was reading the Wikipedia’s page for “The Astonishing” and I’ve seen that the album has been compared to The Who’s “Tommy”, Rush’s “2112”, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.
What do you think of these comparisons?

It’s very flattering, of course, to have our album compared to those major albums, I think that that’s all positive.
For us “The Astonishing” was a large scale project, we put a lot of our passion and our energy into it, and I actually think that that’s the kind of album that in 5 or 10 years people will be looking at from different perspectives.

Were you expecting this kind of reaction when you wrote and recorded it?

Well, we knew it was gonna be different and we weren’t afraid of that at all.
The main thing we were aware of is that “The Astonishing” was going to include some unusual kind of Dream Theater music, a little bit more dynamic, with more sensitive parts and heavier parts kind of mixed in.
We knew that and we thought that at that point in our career we had the desire to go down the path of creating music like that.

Your first work with some of the guys in Dream Theater was with Liquid Tension Experiment, do you think you’ll ever work on some new music with that band?

I think it’s possible, yeah, it’s definitely possible.
Time will tell, one of the things in our lives is that we are incredibly busy.
We hear a lot of requests about Liquid Tension Experiment and that’s definitely in the range of possible.

My next question is on something I’m very curious about because David Bowie is one of my favourite artists ever: you worked on his album, “Heathen”, how was it like to work with him?

It was very interesting!
I found David Bowie to be a unique person, he was very verbal: one of the things that I was interested in is that every time we’d go to record a song he would present the song to me in a very story-like way, for some of them he almost had a description to get me in the mood he wanted me to feel, or what he wanted me to play.
I don’t remember specifically which one on “Heathen”, but he was describing an old dusty bar in France, smoke filled, this whole elaborate description just to set the mood.
He was very much like that, he was great with words.
I didn’t know him very well, of course, ‘cause I just walked into the studio and met him, but I was there for 12 days upon a mountaintop in this beautiful studio that used to be an old factory near New York, and it was really an experience, I found him to be a really cool guy.

Were you a fan of his before working with him?

Like most people I was a fan of his big songs we’ve all heard on the radio, I love ‘Space Oddity’, but I wasn’t that familiar with his whole catalogue.
I wasn’t a huge fan of his, although when I got the call to work for him – it was around the time Dream Theater was recording “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” – I got that call and, of course, even though I wasn’t a huge fan, it was David Bowie calling!
“Oh my God, this is really, really cool!”

Some years back you started using iPhone and iPad on stage to play, how has that affected your approach to keyboards?

I own a company, it’s called Wizdom Music, I develop with some partners cutting edge musical instruments for touch devices, like iPads and iPhones, and those kind of inventions, those kind of instruments definitely affected the way I make music.
Specifically, one of the things I’m really involved with is figure out instruments where you can have a seamless…kind of back and forth between fretless instruments players, like somebody playing a fretless guitar and traditional diatonic playing where you tie individual notes.
So, I took my desire to create instruments that kind of evolve the technology to allow all that kind of expressions, may it be a violin, a guitar or any kind of bending.

Have you tried to use Android devices to do the same?

Everybody asks about Android but the think is that the Android system around the world is different and there are a lot of problems with musical instruments on Android, there are few devices that could actually handle the touch response without giving too much latency.

I just have one final question, have you ever thought of writing a completely acoustic Dream Theater album?

Yeah, we thought of it.
Will it happen? I don’t know.
It might be more likely that maybe at some point we might do some acoustic shows.
It would be more likely that I would do an acoustic album on my own before Dream Theater does.

Davide Sciaky