I love that song “Sound Chaser.” It was during a great time in Yes’ career, having Patrick Moraz in there – some fresh blood in the group – to try different things. Moraz was a huge influence on me in the style of pitch bending. That’s something that Rick Wakemen and Tony Kaye never did. Moraz had a real flair with that kind of approach. And there’s “Dance on a Volcano,” my all time favorite Genesis song, which left a huge impression on me in compositional terms.
I love how Tony Banks approached triads and dropped them over different roots or the same root. “Squonk” is like that for me, too. The Road Home really speaks to the harmonic doors and inspirations. Rhythmically and in the special melodies, this was a really fun album for me. All of these [songs] I love to listen to. It’s never boring for me… but you listen to them and sometimes it sounds a little old. I found myself wishing things were tighter and cleaner, so refreshing those songs and bringing it all up a bit was a lot of fun.
I remember having the same feeling with The Road Home that I had with the Liquid Tension Experiment projects you’re a part of. It’s pretty intense.
I’m glad. It was a very intense process, in terms of the energy and time that goes into these kinds of projects. With something like The Road Home, there really was a lot of thought and work that went into how I would approach things – especially the guests – even before I got into the studio. That manes it really exciting for me.
Talk about all of the collaboration and coordinating that huge list of special guests you have on The Road Home.
It was a combination of people I know; people I didn’t know who were recommended to me and people that I wanted to work with. All of them had some really good ideas on how to best contribute. A lot of phone calls and emails went into coordinating and getting things together; each person had a different story and a different schedule going on. When you collaborate with other musicians that you don’t normally work with, you never know how things will turn out.
I was very fortunate because, as a sign of our times, a lot of them are very capable in the studio and are amazing engineers who are great with technology. Kip Winger, Neal Morse, Steven Wilson… all of these guys are capable of doing amazing home recording in their own studios and you don’t necessarily need to schedule them for face time in a studio and then pay someone else to capture the proceedings in the room. A lot of them cut their own parts and then send along those parts as electronic files on an FTP [file transfer protocol] site.
Article comments
1 - Glen Boyd
This is really, really long Peter. But it is also very, very good stuff. I really enjoyed reading all about the different people Rudess has played with (especially Steven Wilson as I'm a huge P. Tree fan), and about his influences (loved learning about his favorite Genesis songs by Tony Banks).
You might wanna consider breaking this into two, or three parts next time as not everybody is the progressive music fan I am, and might not have the where-with-all to stick it with it.
But personally I loved this as I expect most other Dream Theater/progressive rock fans will as well. Great stuff.
-Glen
2 - Peter
Thanks for the compliment, Glen. Rudess is a great interview... and I had thought about breaking the piece in half, but couldn't seem to find a place I felt comfortable doing so. In the end, a monthly magazine-length feature piece comes along once in a great while for me. I had to leave it intact. Anyway, thanks for checking it out; I appreciate the feedback.
3 - Brian aka Guppusmaximus
Yeah!! Excellent Interview!!
It's about time the man (Mr. Rudess) gets some credit here on BC. He definitely adds dimension to D.T. unfortunately their new album was disappointing(to me).
As for the Progressive Nation Tour, if it was to get huge, I would rather see some more underground prog bands instead of including SOAD or Coheed... They have such a great line-up right now and I wouldn't want to cheapen it any just to make it huge. Maybe add a couple more bands like Aghora,Cynic & Spock's Beard. Adding SP to have another giant that can sell tickets & because they are wicked good.