Dream Theater's Jordan Rudess discusses The Astonishing
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00:00The last concept album that we did was scenes from a memory that came out in
00:1599 I believe so we kind of felt like it was time to to do one again it was
00:21something that was brewing we were really waiting for the right time the
00:25right opportunity to do another concept album and certainly wasn't the right
00:29time when we had the major transition about five years ago and got Mangini in
00:34the band you had to kind of you know get into the flow of things again but but
00:39recently we really felt like it was time to do a very large project and and you
00:47know John Petrucci who wrote the story has been kind of brewing this working on
00:52this for starting back about two and a half years ago and when he started
00:58feeding me like the story idea and he handed me a synopsis at the end of the
01:04last world tour I read through and I got really really inspired it was just some
01:10great ideas I like that kind of almost sci-fi fantasy you know futuristic type
01:15of thing and and when I got home from the tour I started to really come up
01:19with a lot of different ideas sitting at my piano very often first thing in the
01:24morning totally delirious but somehow the musical ideas would come into my
01:29head so we started to collect a lot of music as he was developing his story we
01:35also started to develop a lot of musical ideas short things that would just get a
01:40vibe at the piano and I'd send it off to John and say here how about this one and
01:43they get another how about this one we kind of got on a roll to where we
01:46collected a whole lot of music at which was great because we realized that we
01:51needed a lot of music as we wanted to write a show right in the beginning
01:55John likes to say this this this from the moment of its kind of like birth has
02:01been a large concept we kind of knew that we wanted to be big in scope so we
02:09put together a lot of ideas and set out to you know to write a lot of music so
02:15it started out actually with the two of us kind of you know just working on our
02:21own ideas and sending them back and forth and then we started to get
02:26together I would go to his house he'd come to mine we'd work and then finally
02:29we ended up in the studio working more like every day just to try to get this
02:33done and was a really intense focus because John had this very detailed very
02:40involved story that we wanted to represent and bring out musically which
02:45meant we had to almost treat it as a like a film score and apply you know the
02:51right music for the right characters at the right moments so we would really
02:55very carefully chart out all the themes and all the parts and make sure that it
03:01all made sense it's actually in a way it's a lot more detailed in on every
03:06level than you think a rock album should have to be but we had a lot of fun with
03:11it it was it was he and I in the studio composing the music for this which was
03:15a new way to work as well we decided that that the best way to focus on this
03:20level of a project is for for he and I to be just together with all my
03:25keyboards his guitar my you know computer and just make this thing happen
03:31and just compose this album and that's what we did