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 99 I believe so
00:17we kind of felt like it was time to to do one again it was something that was brewing we were
00:22really waiting for the right time the right opportunity to do another concept album and
00:28certainly wasn't the right time when we had the major transition about five years ago and got
00:33Mangini in the band you had to kind of you know get into the flow of things again but but recently
00:40we really felt like it was time to do a very large project and and you know John Petrucci who
00:48wrote the story has been kind of brewing this working on this for starting back about two and
00:54a half years ago and when he started feeding me like the story idea and he handed me a synopsis at
01:04the end of the last world tour I read through and I got really really inspired it was just some great
01:11ideas I like that kind of almost sci-fi fantasy you know futuristic type of thing and and when I got
01:17home from the tour I started to really come up with a lot of different ideas sitting at my piano very
01:23often first thing in the morning totally delirious but somehow the musical ideas would you know come
01:28into my head so we started to collect a lot of me as he was you know developing his story we also
01:35started to develop a lot of musical ideas short you know short things I would just get a vibe at the
01:40piano and I'd send it off to John and say here how about this one and they get another now about this
01:44one we kind of got on a roll to where we collected a whole lot of music at which was great because we
01:50realized that we needed a lot of music because we wanted to write a show right in the beginning you
01:56know John likes to say this this this from the moment of its kind of like birth has been a large
02:02concept we kind of knew that we wanted to be big in scope so we put together a lot of ideas and set out
02:11to you know to write a lot of music so it started out actually with the two of us kind of you know
02:20just working on our own own ideas and sending them back and forth and then we started to get together I
02:26would go to his house he'd come to mine we'd work and then finally we ended up in the studio working
02:31more like every day just to try to get this done and was a really intense focus because John had this
02:38very detailed very involved story that we wanted to represent and bring out musically which meant
02:45we had to almost treat it as a like a film score and apply you know the right music for the right
02:52characters at the right moments so we would really very carefully chart out all the themes and all the
03:00parts and make sure that it all made sense it's actually in a way it's a lot more detailed in on
03:06every level that you think a rock album should have to be but we had a lot of fun with it it
03:11was it was he and I in the studio composing the music for this which was a new way to work as well
03:17we decided that that the best way to focus on this level of a project is for for he and I to be just
03:23together with all my keyboards his guitar my you know computer and just make this thing happen and just
03:31compose this album and that's what we did