Jordan Rudess Discusses 'The Astonishing' | Classic Rock | Louder
Dream Theater's Jordan Rudess discusses The Astonishing
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:08 The last concept album that we did
00:13 was Scenes From a Memory that came out in '99, I believe.
00:17 So we kind of felt like it was time to do one again.
00:21 It was something that was brewing.
00:22 We were really waiting for the right time,
00:25 the right opportunity to do another concept album.
00:28 And certainly, it wasn't the right time
00:29 when we had the major transition about five years ago
00:33 and got Mangini in the band.
00:35 We had to kind of get into the flow of things again.
00:39 But recently, we really felt like it was time
00:42 to do a very large project.
00:45 And John Petrucci, who wrote the story,
00:49 has been kind of brewing this, working on this,
00:52 for starting back about 2 and 1/2 years ago.
00:56 And when he started feeding me the story idea
01:02 and he handed me a synopsis at the end of the last world
01:05 tour, I read through and I got really, really inspired.
01:09 It was-- I don't know, just some great ideas.
01:11 I like that kind of almost sci-fi, fantasy,
01:14 futuristic type of thing.
01:16 And when I got home from the tour,
01:18 I started to really come up with a lot of different ideas.
01:21 Sitting at my piano, very often, first thing in the morning,
01:25 totally delirious, but somehow the musical ideas
01:27 would come into my head.
01:31 So we started to collect a lot of--
01:33 as he was developing his story, we also
01:35 started to develop a lot of musical ideas,
01:38 short things that would just get a vibe at the piano.
01:41 And I'd send it off to John and say, here, how about this one?
01:43 And I'd get another one.
01:44 How about this one?
01:45 We kind of got on a roll to where we collected
01:47 a whole lot of music, which was great,
01:49 because we realized that we needed a lot of music,
01:52 because we wanted to write a show right
01:55 from the beginning.
01:56 John likes to say, this, from the moment of its birth,
02:01 has been a large concept.
02:03 We kind of knew that we wanted it to be big in scope.
02:06 So we put together a lot of ideas
02:11 and set out to write a lot of music.
02:15 So it started out, actually, with the two of us
02:20 just working on our own ideas and sending them
02:24 back and forth.
02:25 And then we started to get together.
02:26 I would go to his house.
02:27 He'd come to mine.
02:28 We'd work.
02:29 And then finally, we ended up in the studio working more
02:31 like every day just to try to get this done.
02:33 And it was a really intense focus,
02:36 because John had this very detailed, very involved story
02:41 that we wanted to represent and bring out musically,
02:45 which meant we had to almost treat it as a film score
02:49 and apply the right music for the right characters
02:53 at the right moments.
02:54 So we would really very carefully
02:57 chart out all the themes and all the parts
03:00 and make sure that it all made sense.
03:02 It's actually, in a way, it's a lot more detailed
03:06 on every level than you think a rock album should have to be.
03:10 But we had a lot of fun with it.
03:11 It was he and I in the studio composing the music for this,
03:14 which was a new way to work as well.
03:17 We decided that the best way to focus
03:20 on this level of a project is for he and I to be just
03:23 together with all my keyboards, his guitar, my computer,
03:30 and just make this thing happen and just compose this album.
03:33 And that's what we did.
03:35 (upbeat music)
03:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]