Dream Theater have shared a 12-minute video interview of the band members discussing the making of their new album, Distance Over Time.
The band recorded the new album while living together on a property in Monticello, New York. Regarding the unique working process this time out, guitarist John Petrucci says in the interview: “The idea was to do something differently than the last few albums, where a bunch of them we wrote in a studio in more of a traditional setting. But we haven’t really done this thing where we all went away together to a remote place where we could live and write and hang out and bond and eat and cook and just be brothers and musicians.”
Petrucci also reveals that the first song written for the album was a track titled “At Wit’s End.” The song, he says, “just has this energy of…if somebody hasn’t heard us for a while [and asked] ‘What have these guys been up to?’ ”
Regarding how the experience of doing the recent Images and Words 25th anniversary tour may have influenced the making of the new album, keyboardist Jordan Rudess says: “I think it’s so great to connect with, like, the root of what this band is about. I wasn’t there for the writing of Images and Words but I’ve enjoyed playing it so much through the years. And I value it as kind of like a core Dream Theater album. So at a time like this when we all wanted to get together and we wanted to vibe together and reconnect with what it is that makes up Dream Theater, it was really actually amazing to go out and play Images and Words and kind of appreciate that, and take that in and use that information to come into this and create what we did.”
Dream Theater recently announced the release of Distance Over Time for February 22, 2019. The record, their 14th full-length effort of new material, is the follow-up to 2016’s The Astonishing, and their first for new label InsideOut. The band will hit the road in support of the album beginning March 20 in San Diego.
Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
