Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess chatted with Devolution and revealed that his bandmate Mike Portnoy has respectfully asked permission to be involved in decision-making.
“I’m really excited because welcoming Mike back is a really emotional, really beautiful thing to his home, where he really should be,” he said of the drummer’s comeback. “He’s been so wonderful and very respectful of all of us in terms of — he was gone for a long time. And he has all these skills beyond drumming. So he asks, ‘Do you mind if I get involved with this? Is it okay if I get involved with this?’”
Rudess then shared the band’s response to Portnoy’s question: “And we’re always, like, ‘Yeah, man, come on, bring it on. All the stuff that you do, all the Mike Portnoy stuff is important.’ And I am so happy because, you know, when I listen back to the music that we’ve been creating, it’s got his stamp on it. You know that some of the stuff is coming from his brain.”
The drummer earlier revealed that he wasn’t in charge of the band anymore since he was let go and later rejoined the band. “I always wrote all the setlists for Dream Theater, as well as any of my bands or projects,” he explained in an earlier interview with Sonar FM. “That’s an area that’s very important to me. And yeah, when I came back to Dream Theater, a lot of the things we have to figure out who’s gonna be in charge of what. There’s a lot of areas that I used to be in charge of, which now John [Petrucci] may do, or maybe the band makes band decisions. So I have to kind of find my place within the band’s chemistry now.”
13 years after his reunion with the band, Portnoy is still in charge of the setlists. “We let Mike Portnoy take over the setlist again,” his bandmate James LaBrie revealed. “So he’s back to creating the setlist and he’s doing, like we were almost positive he would, he’s done a terrific job. I mean, the setlist he put together… And the thing is with Mike, he was saying, ‘Hey, guys, if there’s a song you don’t wanna do, let me know. If there’s songs that you really wanna do, let me know.’ And so there’s some very strong and cool communication going on. But yeah, he’s glad to be putting the setlist together.”
Portnoy also admitted that he will be including some songs that haven’t been played in a long time.
The drummer rejoined Dream Theater in October 2023 and will be touring with the band for their 40th anniversary celebration. The tour begins in the UK and Europe this fall, starting in London on October 20 and ending in Amsterdam on November 24.