How Dream Theater Embraced Their Legacy With ‘Parasomnia’

Yes, Dream Theater has eras, to put it in Taylor Swift terms. But for most bands, it’s not an easy task to accurately take stock of 40 years of history, something they admirably pull off with Parasomnia, their sixteenth studio album and their first with drummer Mike Portnoy in 15 years.

Luckily for both longtime fans and those who might be discovering their music for the first time while reading this, Dream Theater has never fit into the category of “most bands.” During a recent interview, musician and journalist Frank Godla zeroed in on “Metropolis, Pt. 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper, from the group’s landmark 1992 album Images and Words as his favorite song. It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone do that, he told co-founders John Petrucci and Portnoy.

“Metropolis, Pt. 1,” like a lot of the material on Images and Words, takes more twists and turns than an amped NYC cabbie, spread across nine and a half minutes. Images and Words as a whole, featured a lot of similar moments that were both engaging to listen to and fascinating to examine. It was an element which helped the band get early play at both radio and MTV, with their single, “Pull Me Under,” sounding like nothing else that was on the air at that time.

Watch Dream Theater’s ‘Pull Me Under’ Video

Parasomnia arrives more than 30 years after Images and Words hit the shelves. The new album manages to touch on many of the hallmarks that fans have come to expect with Dream Theater’s music, while ultimately planting its musical feet firmly in the future.

It’s something which Petrucci says was very purposeful. “I wanted to have a Dream Theater record that that exemplified Dream Theater now,” he explains during an interview on the UCR Podcast. “So a modern sounding record, and a lot of that is in the personnel. [We worked with] Jimmy T [James Meslin] and Andy Sneap, our brilliant mixer [and] my goal is always to make sure it’s the best sounding Dream Theater album we could put out. But at the same time, with Mike returning, there’s also sort of this nostalgic element that [we leaned into] during the writing process.”

“You know, if we thought, ‘Oh, this sounds like it could be something off Scenes from a Memory or Train of Thought,” we didn’t abandon it. We’re like, ‘Cool, let’s go with that.’ We are what we are,” he continues. “But also, sonically, I wanted to keep things, not retro, but I wanted to [also] use some vintage things in the modern recording. For example, I went back and contacted Doug Oberkirker, our original engineer, who recorded [our albums from] Images and Words through Train of Thought. I bought the Neve preamps he used on all of my guitars for all of those records and used those on the guitars. We brought in a Yamaha grand piano and had Jordan [Rudess] play that anytime there was a piano. We [also] brought in a real Leslie organ.”

“We’re still experimenting with new recording techniques. The goal is still to have a record that doesn’t sound retro, that sounds modern, but contains the vintage, warm, cozy feeling by using gear that maybe we would have used in 1991 or 1995,” Petrucci concludes. “That combination was very purposeful.”

He admits that it was a lot of fun revisiting some of his past gear, describing how he dug out his vintage amps and did a “massive shootout” between his past and present setups. “It’s actually the perfect example of the modern and the vintage thing,” he details. “If you’re a guitar nerd, you can hear the more modern approach on the rhythm sounds, with the eight and seven string guitars. It’s real heavy and aggressive. It sounds like something that fits today’s metal climate. But if you listen to the lead sounds, they have this sort of old school Santana vibe. We did a lot of that kind of juxtaposition on the album, even with the way the drums were mixed. The discussions I had with Andy Sneap, you know, Mike Portnoy has a very distinct drum sound. I don’t want them over-processed or over-produced. I want them to sound like it’s him playing his drums. Those were some of the goals we went into it with from the very beginning.”

Listen to John Petrucci on the ‘UCR Podcast’

Parasomnia, as an album title, is something the guitarist has had “in his back pocket” for a while, which he thought would make a cool sounding name for one of their albums. He admits that its ties with things like sleep disturbances and dreams are ironic. “We’re called Dream Theater, how come we never thought of this?” The title helped to dictate the direction musically, as well. “[It] kind of calls for a darker, heavier album. It’s not a very light topic,” he says. “It was Mike who [pointed out], I know there’s the parasomnia theme lyrically, but what if we took it a step further and made the album more conceptual? So weaving in all of the different themes throughout the album that reoccur and repeat and connecting the songs and having interludes to make it more of a special experience, that developed as we were in there working on the album.”

What to Expect From Dream Theater’s Concerts

Dream Theater is currently playing its first U.S. dates since Portnoy rejoined the group in 2023 and one thing he’s managing once more is the set lists that the band is playing live, something which is a relief to Petrucci. “He’s really good at it, and he’s the most on top of knowing, which songs we played, when and where,” he explains. “He’s a fan of music and bands and things, so he approaches it from a fan perspective as well. Again, he’s just really good at it. I’m happy that’s been taken off of my plate and given back to him. I think it’s also something that our fans, dare I say, missed. One of the elements they might have missed was him doing that and maybe the set list being too static or this and that. Our fans, when they heard he was coming back, were probably hoping he’d been back in charge of that. So yeah, that’s very much his department once again and I’m happy about it.”

Listen to Dream Theater’s ‘The Shadow Man Incident’