In a new chat with Troy Culpan from Australia’s May The Rock Be With You, Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy opened up about being back on the road with the band after more than a decade away.
When asked whether the comeback has felt “seamless,” Mike Portnoy said (via Blabbermouth): “It was seamless. To me, this was not just rejoining an old band; this was kind of coming home to my family. After 40 years and forming this band when we were teenagers, it’s more than just a band. We’ve lived life together. We’ve been to each other’s weddings and seen our kids grow up together, and we’ve had all these life experiences together. So coming back home to it, it was pretty seamless.”
“There were kind of baby steps that led here, which also made the transition that much more comfortable. I did [Dream Theater guitarist] John Petrucci’s solo album and tour, and then we did a Liquid Tension Experiment album with me, John, Jordan [Rudess, Dream Theater keyboardist], and Tony Levin. So there were these kinds of little steps that led to finally coming back to Dream Theater. So by the time I came back full-time to Dream Theater, it just felt like coming home to a family,” he added.
He also explained how his return influenced the writing and recording of the band’s latest release, 2025’s Parasomnia: “Well, we were definitely inspired writing together. We hadn’t written and recorded an album together since Black Clouds & Silver Linings, which came out in 2009, but we made it in 2008. So it had been 15 years since we had written and recorded an album together. So we were very inspired being together again and having that chemistry, that artistic and creative chemistry that we always had. And it was immediately there once we started working on the new album.”
Asked if the band is already mapping out what comes after Parasomnia — or if fans will “have to wait a little while”—Portnoy pointed to how long the current run has been: “Well, we have to wait, ’cause it’s been a long tour. We’ve been out for a year now at this point. We started in October of 2024. And here we are, a year later now, and by the time we get down to Australia [in February 2026] and wrap up the tour cycle a few months after that, it’ll have been a year and a half on the road. So, that’s the focus right now. But once the tour cycle wraps and concludes by next spring or so, we’ll probably take the summer off, ’cause it’s been a long road, and then start thinking about a new album after that.”
With Dream Theater currently celebrating four decades as a band on its 40th-anniversary tour (launched in late 2024), Portnoy was asked whether that milestone brings “pressure” or if it’s “more of a celebration.”
His answer was direct: “It’s a celebration. There’s no pressure. I mean, for me, it’s surreal that it’s been 40 years since we started this band. We were teenagers at college, Berklee College Of Music, back in 1985, and here we are 40 years later. We’ve been around the world dozens and dozens of times, and it’s just been quite a journey and quite a trip. And if anything, it’s just more surreal than anything. It’s just hard to believe how quickly time has flown.”
He also addressed the “discussions” that go into building the setlist for this tour, saying the process is more straightforward than people might assume: “Well, there’s not really any discussion. Those guys trust that in my lap. I’ve always been the guy who wrote the setlist in the band, at least in my time here, and for me, writing the setlist for this 40th-anniversary tour was actually easier than you would think. Coming back to the band after not having been in the band for over 15 years, whatever it’s been, it was all a fresh, clean slate for me to work with. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I played this song a billion times over the last couple of years.’ I hadn’t played any of these songs in so long. So for me, I was able to write with a clean slate.
“The setlist we’re going to be doing when we come down [to Australia] is slightly different than the one we’ve been doing throughout the rest of the world, because when we started the 40th-anniversary tour, we spent the first six to eight months on tour just concentrating on that,” Portnoy explained.
“But since then, the last few months we’ve been playing the new album, Parasomnia, in its entirety. So when we come down to Australia, it’s kind of gonna be a combination of the two. It’ll be a heavyweight of the 40th anniversary and the full catalog stuff, but we also wanna play a bit more of the Parasomnia album than we had, just because it’s so fresh to us, and it’s the only opportunity that the Australian fans will have to hear those songs. So it’ll be a kind of a combination of the two,” he concluded.
Dream Theater played its first show with Mike Portnoy in 14 years on October 20, 2024, at London’s O2 Arena. A co-founder of the group, Portnoy originally appeared on 10 studio albums over two decades, starting with When Dream And Day Unite and running through Black Clouds & Silver Linings, before leaving in 2010. He officially returned in October 2023, following the band’s long run with Mike Mangini, who handled drums across five studio releases and the tours that followed.
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