Chad Bowar: You just got back from playing some shows in Europe. How was that?
Jordan Rudess: It's always an experience doing all of the European festivals. It's a wild and crazy scene. Some of the shows were really great and exciting for us. We played at the Download Festival in Donington Park in the UK. We had never played there before, so we were psyched to go do it because we had been hearing about it for years. When we got there, the tent was just overflowing with people. A lot of people came out and wanted to check us out.
Do you still have different set lists every night?
Yes, we change it up a bit. It's not completely different. We decided that on this tour, we are not doing “An Evening With” format. We have a couple of bands that are coming out with us and we'll open up for us. We are still going to play for a couple of hours. It is still a hefty night of Dream Theater, but it's not the madness that people have witnessed in the past where we walk off stage and have to resuscitate the drummer. We're not going there this time. We thought we deserved to be a little more human about the whole thing. Even with that, we change it up. Before we go out on the road we learn a lot of music. We have a bigger repertoire to call upon and we try to keep it fresh. And each leg we go on, we add different songs to the set. It's definitely one of the things Dream Theater is all about.
I’ve read that you keep a detailed log of the set lists and refer to them when deciding what to play in each city.
Mike (Portnoy) is very anal about the whole setlist. He will sit there with lists and look at the last time we played in San Diego, for example. He will make sure that there are not a lot of repeats, analyze what happened the night before, what will happen the next night, how far way it is, and give some thought to how the fans might respond to different set lists.
Since you’ve been in the band, is there anywhere you haven’t played live that you would still like to get to?
We are really looking forward to getting to Australia this year. The band has never been there. We are going to go this year and that should be a lot of fun. That will be breaking new ground. It would also be cool to get the band to Israel. There have been a lot of requests. We've never played in India, and that would be an interesting place to give a show.
How did the response to Systematic Chaos compare to your expectations?
This is been a very different kind of album release for us in every way, at least since I joined the group. There's been a lot more marketing, more of a general buzz about things. I've seen the group reach a new level. Even before the new record company started to do anything we started to get to this other place where more people seem to know about Dream Theater. It's hard to completely judge by what you read or by what people tell you how the album is being received. In a way, it's more like time will tell. There's a magazine in Europe that is a pretty big music magazine that reviewed our album. They gave it a 100. The magazine has been around for 10 or 15 years and have never given a 100 before. We've been getting amazing press. Critics have been saying it's great, but occasionally you'll read a critic that doesn't like it. But it's Dream Theater, it's not your standard fare. It's a little more demanding, it goes a bit deeper.
Systematic Chaos was your highest chart debut ever in the U.S. I guess you don’t need to be on a huge label to have commercial success these days.
The cool thing about Roadrunner is that they have that independent kind of mindset, but they have a lot of power. Just after we signed with them, they were bought by Warner. They went from being owned by Universal to being owned by Warner. It's a funny weird thing, because we were just released from a contract by Warner. We were OK with it all because Roadrunner operates independently, and they are very effective in what they do.
Other Dream Theater members have said Systematic Chaos was a fun album to record. Do you agree?
We did have a good time. We just write the kind of music we like and have a lot of fun doing it. What it's all about for us is following our musical vision, just do what we think is best. I think that is a really positive way to go about creating, and it creates a good time all around.
