Inside Dream Theater’s Wildly Ambitious New Concept LP

So that started about two and a half years ago; it took about a year for me to get that story done and ready to present to the guys. And I wanted to write from a place that was familiar to me, so I knew that music had to play a role in the story somehow. I’m a huge fan of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, so I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go. But it was a matter of really diving into it and working on it, revising and revising again, and working on it every day until I had something solid. 

I’m sure you’re bracing yourself for the kind of Hemispheres-meets–Hunger Games media shorthand that’s going appear, but is it completely off base to sense a reflection of your feelings about the commercial music industry in this record?
Besides the main storyline, there is an underlying sort of theme that’s going on. Thinking about how today robotics are taking over a lot of jobs that were once done by humans, and a lot of jobs are becoming obsolete, and that possibly as technology advances and electronic music becomes more advanced — the way people can record, the portability of music, how digital technology is developing — if that was to exponentially grow and develop, what would happen if music actually wasn’t made by humans anymore? If there were no need for humans to make it, because some sort of artificial intelligence made it, what would be missing in our souls as a society? And that is an underlying theme; there’s kind of a juxtaposition throughout the album of this sort of noise music, this music made by the Noise Machines, this artificial intelligence, and how that compares to the music that Dream Theater is playing as our musical score, which has real piano, real organ, real orchestra, real choir, real instruments.

Were there specific albums by other performers or bands that emboldened you to tackle a project this big?
My thought was that this could be taken as far as our imaginations could take it. Not as an album, not only as a standalone show, but it could be novelized, it could be a movie, it could be a musical — it could be all these different things. The one instance that kept speaking to me — where a band had this presentation where it wasn’t only about the album, but there was a movie connected to it, there were animations, and there was a show that was immersive — was when Pink Floyd did The Wall. At the same time, I purposely didn’t want to really think too much about other concept albums or rock operas, and come from more of a storytelling perspective, take my love for everything — whether it be Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Les [Miserables], Jesus Christ Superstar, Disney movies — and come from the perspective of the elements that make those things so special, and such a big part of our lives.