Originally published in Lead Singer Syndrome · April 2018
James LaBrie interview (excerpts)
InterviewJames LaBrie7 min read
Progressive metallers Dream Theater are planning to regroup in late spring to begin work on material for the follow-up to 2016’s “The Astonishing”. “We’re gonna start back in the studio in June – just all be together and writing and working on the new album. We’re hoping that the album will be out, let’s say, February of 2019. And then we’re looking, at this point, that we’d start the next world tour next March.”
Vocalist James LaBrie talked about Nirvana, explaining how the grunge icons had a somewhat similar effect on the audiences as Dream Theater upon entering the music scene. James said on the Lead Singer Syndrome show (transcribed by UG):
I think what happens is anything that I think should be listened to, or anything that is very unique and original is always at the same time jarring. You just mentioned Nirvana. They came out and at first people are like, ‘What the hell is going on here?! It’s like me walking down the street and someone has their garage door open and I’m listening to a band rehearsing!’ But it was much more than that, let’s face it. All those songs are brilliant, and that’s why it stuck. And the same goes for a band like ours. At first it was jarring, I’m sure to many people. But then if they actually sat down and started listening to it, they were going, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I get it!’ I’m sure there’s still many people that don’t get it, but at the same time there were many people that did, enough for it to be able to provide a very lucrative deal for each and every one of us. Or career I should say.”
Still discussing the early days, LaBrie talked about being in a glam metal band called Winter Rose prior to joining the DT fold, saying:
A lot of people ask me, they go, ‘You were able to jump into Dream Theater.’ And I go, ‘Well, yeah.’ It’s always timing with that, because I was in several bands before I hooked up with the Dream Theater, the last band being Winter Rose down in Toronto. And that’s how that whole Dream Theater thing came along – I was touring with Winter Rose, which was the band of myself and Rich Chycki, who happens to be an engineer and has mixed last two Dream Theater albums. It was great. It was more in the vein of Whitesnake meets Skid Row meets Aerosmith, and stuff like that. Very melodically driven. And we were out with Lee Aaron [Canadian singer]. And she came up to me and she was instrumental in orchestrating that get-together with Dream Theater. Because – unbeknownst to me – she sent the discs that we had to these people that she knew in New York who happened to be MCA Records, who also happened to be with Dream Theater. And they knew that Dream Theater was looking for a singer, they heard that tape and were like, ‘Holy shit, we gotta get this over to the guys and see if they’re interested.’ Then they heard it and everything else after that is history as we know it.
You probably assumed the band was going to be something special...
Absolutely. They put out ‘When Dream and Day Unite‘ and I think the best thing that came from that was critical acclaim. Magazines around the world were noting that these guys were a force to be reckoned with musically. When they put out ‘When Dream and Day Unite’ in 1989, those guys were like 21-22 years old, and to be playing that kind of music at that level and putting together compositions that they did was a little precautious. Nowadays it’s a norm. I mean, I can’t believe the musicianship out there today – it’s phenomenal. And it’s scary. But at the time, the one thing that it garnered for them was that magazines around the world and the music industry became aware of this band. It didn’t really sell much at all just due to the nature of the music. Inside you’re hitting a stride or people are made to become aware of you because of a radio hit or something. So going into ‘Images and Words,’ to be honest with you, we all believed that this album had everything that it could possibly have to really draw some massive attention, but was it gonna get its fair shake? And fortunately for us, let’s face it, I don’t know if you and I would be having this conversation today if it hadn’t been for ‘Pull Me Under‘ going through the roof. And I said that all along – that was the catalyst that presented a platform or a tidal wave for us to be able to ride and bring us into subsequent albums and be known worldwide.”
Vocalist James LaBrie was asked by Shane Told to single out the most difficult Dream Theater song for him to perform live, to which he replied (transcribed by UG):
‘Illumination Theory’ – it has its moments where it just gets really freakin’ complicated. With its time signatures, and then where I’m coming in and out... It’s really kind of funky and I really had to like batten down the hatches there and really think about that, especially when I was in the studio initially singing it. And I wanna feel this naturally or it’s gonna feel like I’m a freakin’ robot. You’re so caught up in what you’re doing and you say, ‘Hang on, stop, let me listen back to that. So let me try another take on that.’ And you know where exactly you come in but then you’re talking to the people in the engineer room and then it comes up and you go, ‘Let’s go for this.’ And then the moment comes and goes by and you’re completely capped out – you go, ‘Oh my god, I was totally somewhere else.’“
As you’ve gotten older, has your voice changed?
I’m not singing into stratosphere like I did on [1992’s] ‘Images and Words.’ When we went out on ‘Images and Words’ tour, we tuned down just like a semitone, which is really not much.
Isn’t it mind-blowing how just one semitone can be so important?
It definitely was mind blowing, but it allowed me to sing those songs and go out every night and know that I’m not gonna be just stretching it every night. But I had my vocal rupture in 1994. So the food poisoning there... I recovered, it took me probably close to like almost 7-8 years to fully recover. But even when I fully recovered from that... I bled out to my vocal chords, which can be a career ender. I remember seeing my EMT specialist and she told me, ‘Oh my god, you need to take 6 months off and just be quiet.’ And I said, ‘I actually leave in 7 days for Tokyo.’ And she said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what to tell you. This is gonna be extremely difficult for you. I hope you don’t do any further damage.’ Long story short, I did get back I’d say 95% of my range. But while I used to be able to just go to the stratosphere no problem and scream my head off, I wasn’t comfortable doing that anymore. Even though since ‘94 there’s been many albums that show that I still had the range and all that stuff, it wasn’t like it was previous to the accident where I could wake up and sing like ‘Take the Time‘ or ‘Child in Time‘ from Deep Purple. I just had to learn how to adjust and accept where I am at that point as a vocalist and never push it. Let me put it to you this way – it was freaking horrible. It was a very dark period of my life. First of all – I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but before that I was able to just get up and sing like nothing, it was just effortless. And all of the sudden, I’m straining, I’m cracking, my voice is cracking – it became extremely fragile. I was just kind of waking up with a nightmare going on. But I had to say to myself, ‘You’ve got to toughen up here and you’ve gotta figure it how you’re gonna do it.’ For example, when we finished this last tour in December, we have been out just shy of two years touring. So that’s a lot of shows and each night it’s three hours. And what happened to me a couple of times on the tour, I got pretty sick. Like sinus infection, bad colds, flu, stuff like that. And then nowadays it doesn’t matter when you go out and then you say, ‘I’m only gonna sing 80%, I gotta really watch myself here because I’m a sicker than a dog.’ You’ve got trolls out on the internet and they’re going, ‘What the fuck is wrong with LaBrie?!’ And you’re just sitting there... At the end of the day, you’re still a human being, you’ve got feelings in your life. You get upset, you’re going, ‘You have no fucking idea what I was going through.’ It’s an organic instrument and you’re trying to get the best of it. And it doesn’t matter what singer I’ve talked to in the world, they’ve all gone through it and they’ve all had their acrimonious people that were cutting them up left, right, and center. And it’s a freaking horrible situation. But the way I look at it is like, ‘Whatever...’ You’re not gonna satisfy everyone. They don’t necessarily have to know what you’re going through. If that makes them feel better by criticizing someone when they’re down – so be it. I hope to never sit around and I hope to never meet them because someone like that is just shallow as far as I’m concerned. You know what? We’ve picked our instrument right. And I stand behind it 100%. We’re not gonna be 100% capacity all the time but if you can sit back and say to yourself, ‘For the most part I’m there,’ then that’s all that matters.”