Improvised Vocals
Mike Portnoy of The Winery Dogs
Cris Cohen: And then, you talked about the importance of the vocals and keeping that at the forefront. But it's interesting because, from what I've read, as these songs evolve, Richie (Kotzen) kind of improvises the vocals, sometimes even uttering just basic sounds. How does one wrap a drum part around vocals that are just kind of being made up on the spot?
Mike Portnoy of The Winery Dogs: Well, the melodies are coming pretty early on. When we're in the room, the three of us are bouncing ideas off of each other musically, putting an arrangement together, and I'm prepping to lay down a drum track, usually Richie is doing some sort of scatting on top with melodies. The words may not be there and the exact phrasings may not be there, but the melodies and the possible phrasings are there. And you could kind of work around that.
In the case of “Breakthrough,” being you brought it up, I remember Richie was scatting some melodies and different weird words on the chorus. He kept singing, “I'm falling and breaking / Falling and breaking.” And so we knew that was going to be kind of the rhythmic pattern of the vocals.
And this particular song, when we were at that stage, I kept telling him, “I keep hearing in that phrasing ‘Cause I'm having a breakthrough.’” I kept hearing those words. “I'm having a breakthrough.” So, when it came time for him to start really writing lyrics, I remember even suggesting, “Hey, I kept hearing ‘breakthrough’ instead of ‘falling and breaking,’” which is what he was singing. And he was open to it, ended up embracing that suggestion, and writing around it.
So, there's an example where sometimes he's scatting something in the writing process and it will inspire maybe where the words or the phrasing should go. Sometimes it gets changed. Sometimes it gets kept. I think some of the things he was phrasing early on with “Xanadu” ended up sticking and became the final vocals. So, you never know. When you're in that early stage, you're still experimenting with a lot of different things.