Mike Portnoy has a clear position on artificial intelligence in music, and it has nothing to do with fear of the technology. It’s about what Dream Theater is, and what it has always been.
In a recent conversation with Thailand’s Overdrive Live, the drummer addressed the A.I. question head-on, and connected it to something bigger: the band’s deliberate rejection of anything that removes the human from the performance.
“Oh, no, no,” he said when asked whether the band had incorporated A.I. into the writing of Parasomnia (via Blabbermouth). “It’s all completely organic, and that’s very important to us. Jordan Rudess is very into the technology and A.I. experimentation, but on a personal level, it hasn’t come into the band. I don’t think it will ever come into the band. I think we’re all so serious enough as it is about our own instruments and our own writing and composition that that’s sacred to just being us and has to be fully organic.”
That philosophy runs all the way through to the live show. When asked about getting lost inside Dream Theater‘s more demanding material, Portnoy didn’t flinch. “Well, 7/8’s easy,” he said. “19/16 and 21/16, that’s when it starts to get a little more complicated. But, yeah, sometimes we get lost. It happens. We’re human beings, and I like the fact that we’re human beings. I’m not afraid to make a mistake. I think it shows that it’s not on tracks or it’s not playing to a click. For me, it’s very important not to play to a click.”
“That was something that I needed to establish when I came back to the band. ‘Cause I never used to do it, and I still don’t want to do it. The years that I was away, I know Dream Theater did. So one of the important things for me was to have the human element. I would rather make a mistake and be real than be perfect and boring and a machine. So it was important for me for us to be real. And every once in a while, somebody makes a mistake, and that’s okay. I think that’s what makes music real,” he added.
Scrapping the click track, Portnoy argues it actually makes recovery easier, not harder. “I think it’s easier without a click track,” he said. “In fact, I heard the guys talk about it, because they would say when they were playing with a click track with Mike Mangini, if there was ever a mistake, it was hard because you were tied to the [track]. You couldn’t fluctuate; you couldn’t make it work.”
As the band’s self-described conductor, Portnoy runs the whole production from behind the kit, with lights, lasers, video, and bandmates all tied to his cues via an electronic pad. The cowbell, of all things, is his emergency reset.
“At the end of the day, I’m the conductor — the drummer’s the conductor in the band — and I’m the one that’s setting the tempos and hitting the cues and playing the retards at the end of the songs,” he explained. “Everybody’s following me and watching me, including our lightman and our laser person and our video people; they’re all tied in with what I’m doing. I have an electronic pad behind the kit that I cue everybody. Only we can hear it in our ears. So I’ll cue everybody. And if ever anything falls off the track, as the drummer and the conductor, I have to get everybody’s attention with the cowbell and bring us back together. It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s a good little trick to have.”
Parasomnia, Dream Theater‘s 16th studio album, was released in February 2025 via InsideOut Music. Portnoy has also confirmed that the band’s 04/22 show at Movistar Arena in Santiago, Chile, will be professionally recorded for a future Blu-ray release.
