Dream Theater vs Liquid Tension Experiment
Mike Portnoy
Cris Cohen: As we were talking just before we hit record, your experience with Liquid Tension Experiment was all about…
Mike Portnoy of The Winery Dogs: Spontaneity.
Cris Cohen: Exactly. (Years ago) I asked you what the difference was between album one and album two and you said, “We took twice as long to record that… a whole two weeks.”
Mike Portnoy: <laugh> Well, those LTE sessions I did in the late nineties was really the first experience of writing and recording simultaneously. Because up until that point, I only had Dream Theater in the 80s and 90s, before those LTE albums. And all of those early Dream Theater albums, especially, “When Dream And Day Unite,” “Images And Words,” and “Falling Into Infinity,” — the first, second, and fourth albums — we had years to compile that material. The only exception was “Awake,” which we were thrown off the road, back into the studio, had to write and record. But the first, second, and fourth album, we were in holding patterns where we would spend months, even years, writing that material. So, by the time we got together after those first four Dream Theater albums – John Petrucci and myself, along with Jordan Rudess and Tony Levin – we had this Liquid Tension Experiment… experiment <laugh>. Literally. That was why the word was in there.
Those first two albums were the first times we ever went into a studio with a blank canvas, jammed… either spontaneously jammed and that made the record or jammed and wrote, in a jamming sense, and arranging on the spot and then recording. So those first two albums were the first time I had ever done that. And I've done it dozens and dozens of times since. It's kind of become the way that I work with most of the bands I'm a part of. Dream Theater embraced that style of writing and recording after the LTE albums and the albums that followed. And all the other things I've done through the years, whether it be Transatlantic or Flying Colors or Winery Dogs or Metal Allegiance, most of those cases are kind of… get in the studio, jam, bounce ideas off of each other, create the music, and then hit record and go. I like that way of working. It keeps you on your toes, keeps it fresh, keeps it spontaneous. The inspiration is right there in the moment. So, it's a style of writing and recording that I started with LTE in the 90s, but I've embraced ever since.
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