A few months ago, Mike Portnoy announced his departure from Dream Theater, the band that he founded alongside John Petrucci and John Myung. This short post is a tribute to Mike, because even though I do not agree with all his views, opinions and attitude towards music, I highly respect him as a musician and as a person and I think that without him, Dream Theater will never be the same band that I have grown to love over the years.
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| Mike Portnoy |
Before explaining what the title means, I feel the need to write a few words about the end of an era of this great band. I've been listening to Dream Theater's music since 1997, and it has made me feel obsessed, bewildered, blissful, melancholic, scared, awesome and in love. It all started with "Images & Words", which I admit that I thought was kind of boring and incomprehensible when I first listened to it 14 years ago. A few months later though, the same friend that was always trying to get me into Dream Theater, gave me their new then CD to listen to, called "Falling Into Infinity".
That was love at first hearing. I'm not going to go into specifics, but New Millennium, Peruvian Skies, Hell's Kitchen and Trial Of Tears are among my all time favourite songs and I also think that this was their last "majestic" album. I love all their albums, but sometimes I wish they had kept going towards that more "progressive rock" direction than the one they actually followed. After Falling In Love with Infinity, I listened to their older albums more and more, suddenly discovering "A Change Of Seasons" in 1998, which I used to listen about 10 times a day every day for several weeks. In fact, I am going to play it right now again.
I have attended five out of the six concerts (1998, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007) that Dream Theater have played in Athens, and I do not really care about the one I missed, as it was a second night of a 2-day special Dream Theater event, where they played Number Of The Beast in its entirety. In other words, I couldn't care less (though it really hurts that they played Surrounded, The Glass Prison & Misunderstood on the same night). I am lucky to be able to see them again this August, since I am going to be back in Greece for the summer, as I currently live in NYC. It's not going to be the same without Mike of course.
Let's go back to numbers. Throughout the years, Dream Theater have released 10 studio albums. If you add the songs of these 10 albums, it will give you a magic number.
- When Dream And Day Unite : 8
- Images & Words : 8
- Awake : 11
- Falling Into Infinity : 11
- Scenes From A Memory : 12
- Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence: 13
- Train Of Thought : 7
- Octavarium : 8
- Systematic Chaos : 8
- Black Clouds & Silver Linings : 6
Hold on, this number is not 100, it's 92. But wait, what about songs that did not make it to any album? There are some of those hanging around over the years, appearing only in live versions or as B-sides to select singles... one of those is a song called "Don't Look Past Me", a beautiful song that was originally meant to be included in "Images & Words" but was left out for reasons unknown. Another one is the all-time classic "To Live Forever", which was written between "Images & Words" and "Awake" and has appeared on the "Lie" single. It was properly released in the band's best-of-compilation album "Greatest Hit" in 2008. Another song from almost the same era, is the instrumental song "Eve", which appears on the "The Silent Man" single, a nostalgic and peaceful song. Also, one of Dream Theater's most important songs ever is "A Change Of Seasons", the 23-min long epic I wrote about earlier, which was released in 1995 as an EP, along with a few live covers.
What most people don't know about "Falling Into Infinity", is that it was initially supposed to be a double album, containing Metropolis Part II and a few other songs that did not make the final cut. The demo of those sessions was reworked when Jordan Rudess joined the band, supplemented with many new melodies and songs and finally became "Scenes From A Memory" in 1999. Anyway, the songs that did not make the final cut of "Falling Into Infinity" appeared later in a compilation called "Cleaning Out The Closet", a fan club CD that included all the B-sides or unreleased songs that Dream Theater had ever recorded. The 5 songs that are missing to round it up to 100 are : Raise The Knife, Cover My Eyes, Speak To Me, Where Are You Now, The Way It Used To Be.
So, ok, you may have noticed that the songs are not 100, they are 101, but I have cheated a little, only because I had forgotten the existence of "Don't Look Past Me" and I just came across it when I was doing research for this blogpost, but who really cares? The most important is that I am able to say that our beloved Mike Portnoy has left the band after 10 albums, 100 songs, almost 10000 days and 100000000000 special moments for each one of us... We already miss you Mike, and even though we will listen to the new Dream Theater album, the 11th album of the band is the one that the other guys will record with you when you come back.