DREAM THEATER Keyboardist On Touring With IRON MAIDEN, Covering Other Bands' Songs

Jeffrey Easton of Metal Exiles recently conducted an interview with DREAM THEATER keyboardist Jordan Rudess. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On touring with IRON MAIDEN:

Jordan Rudess: Last night was the first night and the exciting part of this tour are the big shows with the large audiences. We have big audiences but we do not draw the numbers that they do so this is our chance to play in front of a large crowd. Usually the opening act plays to an empty place but a lot of people showed up early for us so it kicked off well.

Metal Exiles: I would imagine you have some of the same crowd considering the virtuosity and the draw would be about the same.

Jordan: Well, it's just the size of the crowd. IRON MAIDEN are still huge. They still can draw about 20,000 people to any given gig.

Metal Exiles: You guys are still promoting "Black Couds & Silver Linings" and the music is again stellar. I know THEATER writes as a collective but how much of you (personality-wise) goes into the writing?

Jordan: The way the band works is that there are three main writers in the group — Portnoy, Petrucci and myself. Together we write all of the music but Petrucci and myself will write all of the notes and harmonies but sometimes Mike will write some of the notes. Mike is the director, if you will, guiding the writing, if you will, organizing all of the riffs that we write and coming up with suggestions. But for me, the way that DREAM THEATER works is that they allow much of me stylistically to come forward in the work. I go out and collect ideas, interesting technologies, seeing what I can get away with and bring them into the band to keep our sound fresh and keep moving forward.

Metal Exiles: That being said, how much ground do you think you broke musically with "Black Clouds"?

Jordan: The band is not an electronic, futuristic ensemble, we are bout tipping the hat to the art rock/metal scene and the magic of DREAM THEATER is really about our own particular combination of ideas together. You have the metal side and the prog side and mixing with virtuosity you have DREAM THEATER. What ground we break is in how we put the styles together. From a personal standpoint and the technologies we use, since I use many new things, the Continuums, iPads, iPhones and using DREAM THEATER as vehicle to introduce these things to the world, is the flavor of what we are talking about.

Metal Exiles: I have the special three-CD edition with the bonus cover songs and I know you have performed covers in the past but I must say that "Stargazer" (RAINBOW song) is the best yet. To me, Tony Carey was a great keyboardist, so what was it like covering his parts for "Stargazer"?

Jordan: It was fun, but in that kind of that situation, you have to be respectful of the original except for the possible ways of moving it forward and improving things with new technologies that were not available when they first recorded the song. A lot of times in DREAM THEATER when we cover something, we try to add our sound to it, whether it be in the form of being tighter because our fans know us to be precise but we are respectful in not changing it all that much.

Read the entire interview from Metal Exiles.