MIKE PORTNOY Believes That He Is ‘More Of A Team Player’ Now Than He Was During His Initial DREAM THEATER Run

In a new interview with Japanese music critic and radio personality Masa Ito of TVK’s “Rock City”, DREAM THEATER drummer Mike Portnoy was asked what he has added to the band since he rejoined the progressive metal giants in October 2023 after a 13-year absence. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It is not really for me to say. I can’t sit here and pat myself on the back and kind of tell all the things I bring to the band. I think it’s more for the fans or the listener to kind of come up with that opinion. But I think it’s pretty well known what I bring to the band. It’s been this way since the beginning of the band 40 years ago.”Mike continued: “I was always contributing in every area — not just the drums, but collaborating on the music and the lyrics and the melodies and the production and the merchandise and the fan club and everything that goes into being in a band. I’m a very hands-on type of person, so for the first 25 years of the band, I oversaw all of that stuff. And then when I left the band, the guys had to kind of figure out how things were gonna get distributed amongst themselves. And however they decided that, that’s the way they continued without me. And now coming back in the band, I’ve had to be very, very respectful of what they’ve been doing all the years without me. It’s a very different organization than when I left in 2010.”When I left in 2010, I was a control freak. and overseeing everything and very protective of everything,” Portnoy added. “But now coming back, I need to respect that they’ve been touring for all these years without me and making records without me, so they have perhaps different ways of doing things. So, I had to come in very respectful and kind of tippy-toe my way around each area to see how much they wanted from me. There are some areas where they put complete control back into my lap. There’s other areas that maybe they wanted to retain some control and maybe ask me to take a step back. So, it’s been a learning process over the past year or so how the new chemistry was going to function. And it’s been very easy, I think. We’re all older and wiser at this stage of our lives. When I left the band in 2010, I was in my early 40s. Now I’m in my late 50s. And I think as you get older and you have more life experiences, you learn more, you learn how to behave in a more mutually beneficial way and try to be respectful of other people’s opinions and ideas. And that’s a lot of the stuff I learned all the years outside of DREAM THEATER. I did so many other bands and projects and albums, each one of which had a very different chemistry that I would have to adapt to. So I think adapting to all those different situations throughout the years really helped me to be more of a team player than maybe I was the first time around.”Last month, Portnoy was asked by Sakis Fragos of Rock Hard Greece why he wasn’t involved with the production of DREAM THEATER’s latest album, “Parasomnia”, after being credited as co-producer for the band’s six prior LPs he appeared on, starting with 1999’s “Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory”. He responded: “Well, to be honest, it was one of the very first things that [DREAM THEATER guitarist] John Petrucci brought up to me when the two of us began discussing the possibility of me coming back [to DREAM THEATER in 2023]. There were a lot of things that happened while I was away that they wanted to remain intact, and that was one of the things that was very important to John, was to maintain the sole producer credit. And what can I say to that? Would I have liked to have reunited the production team the way it always was? Yeah, I would have. But the reality is when he brought that up to me, I needed to respect that.”Portnoy continued: “When I left the band [in 2010], [John and I] were producing the albums together, and after that he began producing on his own. So, obviously, over the last five albums, that was the way that the band functioned. If that’s very important to him, then I need to respect that. I can’t just come back into the band and demand things to be the way they used to be. It’s impossible. We’re not the same people and things have transpired over a decade and a half at this point. So I needed to be respectful of his request for that. And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.”But to be honest, it didn’t dilute any of my ideas,” Portnoy explained. “All of my ideas were always welcome. And some of the things that I did suggest, like the conceptual, thematic stuff, a lot of that stuff falls under the category of producer, but if John wants the sole credit, that’s totally fine. All that meant for me is that I don’t have to be in the studio 24-7 babysitting the keyboard tracks or the bass tracks, and that’s fine with me. I live three hours away. So, I was more than happy to delegate that all to John and be able to get home and spend a little time with my family here and there.”DREAM THEATER kicked off the North American leg of its 40th-anniversary tour on February 7 at The Met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The trek is “An Evening With Dream Theater” and is the first tour of North America since Portnoy’s return to the lineup, joining Petrucci, singer James LaBrie, bassist John Myung and keyboardist Jordan Rudess. The tour will conclude on March 22 in New York City.DREAM THEATER’s sixteenth studio album, “Parasomnia”, came out on February 7, 2025 via InsideOut Music. The LP marks DREAM THEATER’s first release with Portnoy since 2009’s “Black Clouds & Silver Linings”.”Parasomnia” was produced by Petrucci, engineered by James “Jimmy T” Meslin, and mixed by Andy Sneap. Hugh Syme returns once again to lend his creative vision to the cover art.Portnoy co-founded DREAM THEATER in 1985 with Petrucci and Myung. Mike played on 10 DREAM THEATER albums over a 20-year period, from 1989’s “When Dream And Day Unite” through 2009’s “Black Clouds & Silver Linings”, before exiting the group in 2010.Mike Mangini joined DREAM THEATER in late 2010 through a widely publicized audition following the departure of Portnoy. Mangini beat out six other of the world’s top drummers — Marco Minnemann, Virgil Donati, Aquiles Priester, Thomas Lang, Peter Wildoer and Derek Roddy — for the gig, a three-day process that was filmed for a documentary-style reality show called “The Spirit Carries On”.[embedded content]