Plini interview (excerpt)

Dream Theater were a huge influence on my idea of what prog is. Especially between ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Octavarium’ – the end of every album leads into the beginning of the next one, which is an insane conceptual thing to do over like a decade. And then within the album, they’ve got these recurring themes and stuff. Being a huge fan, I would go on Dream Theater forum and just read what people were nerding out about. They were making these crazy charts, like, ‘Here’s this theme. And then I heard it in that song, and then it reappears here, and that’s a clip from there.’ I thought, wow, you can make music that you can listen to once and it has a great impact and it’s got great playing and everything, and then on top of that, you can do all these cheeky intellectual things that give it something you can go back to and keep finding more. So I think that was my shallow interpretation of that – ‘Hey, I’m gonna repeat myself cheekily all the time, ‘cause it makes me prog. [Chuckles]