Systematic Chaos is Dream Theater's 10th studio offering over a career of 20 years... with a career as long as yours, and being in a scene that doesn't get as much exposure as other scenes, what do you think has been one of the biggest keys to Dream Theater's success?

Well I think it is the music. I think what's given us the success is the fact the nature of our music isnt neccessarily today's flavour, and never has been, and I think the fact that we've always maintained the integrity throughout [means] that the fans that are into a more progressive style or metal style band tend to still like where we go.

I think it's the fact that once we have come in contact with a listener and they've actually heard some of the music, I think it begins a relationship not unlike the relationship I personally had with Rush when I discovered them ... wanting to continue to listen to each and every album and expect change and expect something new and something experimental, and something exciting, and I think that's what really captured our audience and helped maintain it as well as enlarge it with every outing.

The band's sound has changed and progressed a lot through the years, and the last few albums have had a few different swings... Train Of Thought was much heavier, Octavarium got back to more progressive sort of sounds. .. with Systematic Chaos, how do you think that sits in the progression of Dream Theater's sound?

I think one of the most important things for us personally with the music is to stay contemporary... we always have our fingers on the pulse. Each band member obviously listens to things that are similar to one another, but then we also each have bands that we listen to that not neccesarilly anyone else in the band will... and I think that helps enable us to pull from these [different sources] and bring it into our own writing and our own styles.

Train Of Thought was a statement that "this is going to be a heavy album", and it was. It was bombastic, it was relentless, it was agressive to the highest extent, and the difference with Systematic Chaos is that there's more balance and there's more control over how we're presenting the heaviness. We're giving [the compositions] more atmospheric tones, I think it's more dynamic, and I think there's a good balance with the complexity and technical aspect that goes in there, and it's not over the top.

So I think that because of that we're still able to present throughout some of the album the heavy elements that have been with Dream Theater and maybe has become more and more evident over the last few years. But I think there's a real good cap on it and I think that we're able to strike up a really good balance between the two worlds, being the progressive and the heavy metal.

There's also other styles that we like to explore... and that might be the mellower track, "Repentance", where I look at that more like a Tool meets Pink Floyd kind of approach, for me, and then you might say we're touching on something that's a little bit more mainstream when you're talking about a song like "Forsaken", but a little bit more contempory sounding. But to me, there's a lot more balance and a lot more depth in there, and I think we're pulling more from our involvement in music throughout our entire catalogue with this album, more so than some of the previous albums.

Do you find that sometimes it feels like a bit of a catch 22 when you're in a progressive metal band and something changes in the band, like an influence or the way you guys write, do you find it's hard to sometimes find a balance on how far you can push a change in a certain direction?

I think we find it hard to maintain a balance. I think when we do write something and we feel we've completed that idea or we feel good about what we've written, then it's recorded. But what happens is the fans sometimes have a real hard time wrapping their heads around that concept, the fact that first of all, people are always going to make comparisons because they want to be able to somehow feel connected to it. So you know, automatically people are going to say "oh there's a Metallica influence, here they're doing a Muse thing", and I mean we hear it all. And you know it's funny because even when we're writing, we'll say "oh, I can hear the comparisons already", you know?

So really with us, I think as long as we feel comfortable with what we're doing, and as long as we don't feel that we're blatently ripping someone off or there's plagiarism in any sense of the word coming into play, then it's us being true to ourselves and maintaining that integrity but just wanting to experiment.

The way I like to express that is, you know, we like to experiment in those styles of music as well, and this is our presentation or this is our way of expressing that particular direction of music. Who gave them the almighty rights to that style of music, whether you want to say it sounds like Metallica or we sound like Muse, give me a break, you know? Granted yeah it is in that vein, and it is in that direction, but you know, this is our way of writing something that might be construed as such.

On the electronic press kit for Systematic Chaos, you're seen as saying it was the most fun you've had recording since Awake. What do you think has been diffent with this album, as opposed to the albums that came after Awake up until now, that made it more fun?

Well, I think as time goes on we feel more comfortable with what we're doing as a band. I think individually we feel better about ourselves and feel we're continuing to grow. There's always some sort of conflict that people in general are dealing with in life, just because life is what it is, but I think with the band it's even that much harder becuase you're contending with five other individuals, with five relationships going on, and you need to interact with one another in a positive sense which isn't neccissarilly always attainable. But I think as time goes on that becomes more and more easy and I think we feel better about the band than we ever have. I think it's been progressing to this point in the last few albums, and I think because of that we're feeling a heck of a lot more connected and I think the music is really saying something in that sense. And also with me personally, I've completely recovered from a very bad vocal injury that happened 12 years ago, and it took me an incredibly long time to get over it and it wasn't until 2003 that I started to feel that things were actually starting to come back online.

I ruptured my vocal chords at the beginning of '95, and it wasn't irreperable, but basically the specialists told me that it was going to be a while before I even felt any of it coming back, and now I feel great, I feel at the top of my game again, and when we perform I'm singing like I once did [before the rupture]. In fact I think there's better tonality in my voice, there's more maturity there, so I'm probably at the top of my game.

So that also helps to make the writing and the recording process a lot more fun because I have a lot more confidence and self esteem, and I think that was really lacking with me personally for many years, and it was very unfortunate. But I do think too that we really think that we're starting a whole new chapter with this album, not only being with a new label, but we just feel that these are exciting times for the band, we all feel great about what we're doing, we all feel that we're really confident in what we're doing and I think there's a hell of a lot more in us to continue that.

Speaking of the new label Roadrunner, here in Australia a lot of people were excited when we heard Roadrunner had come on board because they do a lot out here for metal in Australia, and they've brought out a few bands that people wanted to see that hadn't been here previously. Are you guys looking at trying to come out?

Well that's one of the things that attracted us to Roadrunner... we know that whenever they've signed a band they've signed it because they believe in it. We heard about the fact that they do promote and market the hell out of their bands and we were aware of their strong presence in Australia, because Australia has been a bone of contention with us as far as "why the hell haven't we been there", you know?

And we're really an unknown entity over in Australia. I mean as far as we are known I think it's mainly due to the internet, be it a site like yours or our own sites that have brought awareness, and word of mouth obviously is still an incredibly strong tool and vehicle.

But definitely I can tell you that with almost 100% certainty that we will be coming there this tour. They're talking about doing four or five shows, and our booking agent is in touch with a promoter over there, one of the bigger ones that are really excited to bring us over, so it's just a matter of finding the time that we can get in there and do it. But as soon as we have something, and it could be as early as within the next month, we might have something to announce. But we've all been saying it, and we told our management, our booking agent that this needs to happen, you know, it's enough.

Well we've been waiting!

I know you have! And we've heard over the years that it's so expensive to tour Australia, well give me a break! We hear every other band's going there, why cant Dream Theater? We've toured in very expensive places before, so why aren't we doing it there? They go, "well because the other areas in the world you tour in that are very expensive, the promoters are willing to bring you over and pay for what you charge", and we haven't met that promoter in Australia yet. But I guess that's changing now and there is a promoter there who is aware of just how big Dream Theater is, and it will be a great run.

I think one of the things with Australia as well is that it's a massive country, but all the cities are pretty far apart, so it gets hard to transport everything a couple of thousand kilometers to do two shows.

Yeah, well that's what we've been told, basically if we're doing four shows, we're flying to all four shows and so is our equipment. So you're right, that is astronomically expensive. It's not so much flying us, the bodies, it's the equipment because we have such a big backline... I mean Mike's drums alone are a lot to cart around.

But anyway, I think that it's long overdue, and we're absolutely thrilled to come there. I think it's going to be a great time.

Getting back to Systematic Chaos, the album has a pretty dark tone and there a couple of songs that are fantasy themed songs, was it fun working with themes like vampires and pharaohs haunting towns?

Well, with Dream Theater the music has always been written before the lyrics, so I think the music is what enticed John [Petrucci] to write about these fantasy-based lyrics. Whether it be about a protagonist and the antagonist vying for the ultimate position as Dark Lord, which is what "In the Presence Of Enemies" is about, becoming the ultimate leader of the army of damned souls, or whether it be "The Dark Eternal Night", talking about an entity from thousands of years ago luring people into his cult and then manipulating them and cursing them and damning them... I think with us there are certain directions we want to go musically where we like to come down in a more Slayer or Pantera-esque direction, but the songs weren't really stemming from a lyrical idea, it's more the other way around.

International prog bands have always been pretty popular in Australia... OzProg originally started as a site that was petitioning promoters to bring Dream Theater, but since we changed the site to being more about the prog community, we've had all these young prog bands come out of the woodwork in Australia that never really had anywhere to promote themselves or give them any exposure. Have you got any advice or lessons that Dream Theater might have learned along the road in their career that might help them in trying to be successful in breaking into the music scene?

Well if you go back to very beginning, when the first album came out, the guys were excited about it, but it was released and it basically did nothing. It had some critical acclaim with some magazines and in certain areas of the world, but it really didn't do anything for them, and it was only through perserverance and the fact that they completely believed in themselves that they continued to write. I think the best advice for any band, especially a progressive band coming up, is to be persistent, to play as many gigs as you can and to make as many phone calls as you can until you make the connections to get a label, or to make a label become aware of you. That's the only way that you can really do it.

You can send tapes and if you think you have the music that's really going to make a statement and be something unique and something that they might say "wait a second here, this is worth looking into", that's great. But I also think that it's important for a band to try and play out as often as they can because that also will improve the band as players. It's an extremely hard business but I think every band has dealt with that hardship at some point in their careers, usually at the infancy stage, but I think it's always possible [to attain success], and I think if there's enough belief there they can make it happen.

And talking about earlier in your career, you guys celebrated the anniversary of Images And Words the other night by playing it live in full. Do you find that the material from back then is still as fun to play as it was when it was new?

Well it was definitely fun to play that night because I can't remember the last time we've done that. I think it was the Images And Words tour that we actually [played all the songs from the album at one show], because that's all we really had (laughs). But I don't think that we've played that album from beginning to end since that tour. So to actually play it from the beginning to the end was really exciting... you know through the years we've played this song or that song from that album, and we've done medleys of it and stuff like that, but to play it from start to finish felt great, the energy was there and the crowd was going nuts, cause it always has been looked favourably upon, you know, as one of our classics, so it was very cool.

Looking back at writing then and writing now, do you think that you're writing stuff that's more complex in terms of concept or even just the songwriting?

Well I think that definitely our writing has evolved and I think it's stronger in the sense that it's more song-oriented. You can look at a lot of the albums and say "well yeah they were kinda over-the-top there" or "that was a little superfluous", and we've always had that thrown at us, but that's the kind of band we are, we're a technical band and to a certain extent it's about the players and what they're capable of doing. And the kind of music we write [now] is of a complex nature, but I think what's changed is that it's become more song focused, and it's about the song having a beginning, a middle and a end... and keeping it exciting throughout, keeping it very focused, having a purpose behind it that will send a message very strongly and very clearly without necessarily incorporating all the other technical and complex elements within each and every song.

And do you have a favourite track from the new album?

Right now it's a toss up between "Ministry Of Lost Souls" and "In The Presence Of Enemies Part 2", those are definitely my favourite tracks.

"In The Presence Of Enemies" parts 1 and 2 you guys are performing back-to-back live, is that right?

Well that would be the only way to play it... it would have to be played in its entirity. For the tracklisting and the sake of the disc they were separated, but I think it's cool because you're able to ingest one, and then you can continue with the saga at the end of the album.

But you know we just started playing some of the new songs last night in the show... "Constant Motion", "The Dark Eternal Night" and "Forsaken", and they went over great. It's another thing for us to get them tighter, but that'll come, it's only the second show. (laughs)

I interviewed Mike when he was here with G3 and one of the things I was saying was that promoters in the past have looked at CD sales and said, "oh no, it's not viable to get them out here", but the fans have been here.

Yeah, the amount of CDs sold there is in no way an indication of how many fans we have there, and I think another example is South America. We went down in '98 and then we hadn't gone back for several years, and it was told to the promoters, "why isn't Dream Theater coming down?", "well they haven't sold a lot of albums down there".  Well, first of all, South America is one of the biggest black markets in the world when it comes to CD sales, so what are you basing that on? And that's not what this band is all about... we've sold almost 8 million albums, so I mean we've sold a lot of albums, but in that area you can't really have a true indication. So they finally said, "OK we're gonna book them", and we go down there and we're playing in front of 8,000 and 10,000, and then we play in Chile and it's 25,000 so the promoters were blown away! They were like "oh my god, you guys were so right about this". I think we're going to get the same reaction down in Australia.    Maybe not 25,000 people at one show, but I would easily say that there could be anywhere from 3-5,000 people a night.

And like I said, from my lips to god's ears, it looks like it's in the works and it should definitely happen. It's been told to me that it's definitely in the works and it looks like it's 100% happening, it's just a matter of the working out all the details now and working out the time that it makes sense for us to go down there. And obviously it would make sense for us to go down there when we're doing the rest of the Pacific Rim with Japan and Korea and Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia. But we're definitely all excited and we more than anything want to get down there.