Dream Theater's Jordan Rudess Releases Excellent Solo "Band" Album
"Permission to Fly" isn't your typical keyboard wizard solo album.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection! I’m excited to bring you my thoughts on a new “solo” album by Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment keyboard maestro Jordan Rudess. Jordan was kind enough to spend some time with me discussing his upcoming album, Permission to Fly, which sounds much more like a band album than his previous solo releases. Rather than turning out a collection of instrumentals or using multiple musicians, Rudess focused on a collection of musicians for the entire record that he can envision becoming a bona fide band.
Let’s get to that story.
Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment keyboard maestro Jordan Rudess has been releasing solo albums since 1988’s Arrival. While many artists tout their latest work as their best to date, Rudess may be correct if he takes that same position. His new solo record, Permission to Fly, drops on Sept. 6 on Inside Out Music digitally, on CD, and as a 2-LP vinyl release, and it could be his best solo work ever.
Many virtuoso musicians who aren’t front men tend to release solo albums that are instrumental only or have an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. That has even happened in Rudess’ own back catalog, where sometimes musicianship has trumped songwriting. But on Permission to Fly, that is not the case.
The new album features a steady cast of musicians that complement Rudess’ style, rather than a parade of talented guests. Rudess plays keyboards, guitar, and various other electronic bits and bobs (he has always lived at the cutting edge of technology). But the band he’s assembled for the recording of Permission to Fly is one that he could envision becoming an active performing band.
Joe Payne, who goes by “That Joe Payne” and was a member of progressive rockers The Enid for five years, handles the album’s vocals brilliantly. Darby Todd, known for his work with Devin Townsend, is the drummer. Rudess uses two guitarists on the album in addition to contributing some of his own guitar work — Steve Dadaian and Bastian Martinez. He gave lyric-writing duties to his daughter, Ariana.
The result was an album of songs that aim to balance the darkness, violence, and turmoil going on in the world with the light that still exists.
“When it came time to write the lyrics for this album, and of course I needed to, because I wanted it to be vocal, I thought, ‘Well, you know, I could write them, but, you know, where am I coming from?’ I'm more interested in how the words sound,” Rudess said. “I like spacy, floaty, trippy things. But I thought, ‘You know what, on this album, let's go a little bit deeper. Let's do it in a different way. So I asked Ari if she wanted to tackle writing words for this album, knowing that she is a great writer and can really come up with some serious stuff.”
The album kicks off with “The Final Threshold,” where Rudess gets to fuse some of his own signature sounds with heavy influences from Keith Emerson. Rudess uses a variety of keyboard styles and sounds throughout the album, along with plenty of piano. But the record doesn’t just serve to show off his unquestionable chops. The opening track’s keyboard pyrotechnics in the intro give way to a spacey, atmospheric and ethereal song with delicate vocal work from Payne.
“Into the Lair” shows that the album isn’t going to be all over the map from a sonic standpoint. The second track is a harbinger of the cohesiveness and band feel of the entire album. The song is like the offspring of a Dream Theater and Toto collaboration, drifting between faster and slower sections. It’s the album’s longest track at nine and a half minutes, and it’s my favorite track in which to discover something new with each listen. There are depths and layers of intricate and cool parts from all the musicians involved, with some crazy twists and turns throughout the middle instrumental sections. Rudess shows off some of his most blistering playing in this one. The song also contains my favorite solo on the album with Martinez’s standout playing.
I’m not sure I enjoyed “Haunted Reverie” the first few times I heard it, but it has grown on me. It’s a quirky number and reveals its treasures more upon repeated listens.
“The Alchemist” was the first pre-release “single,” despite being eight and a half minutes long. It contains some keyboard bits that are identifiable as belonging to the Dream Theater sound. That’s obviously because Rudess himself has been part of that band’s music since Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory in 1999, but I don’t hear any outright copying of parts he’s played before.
The song contains one of two guitar solos that Rudess contributed to the album, although he said he was too shy to play it on the video that accompanied the single.
“The guitar has been a serious hobby for me over the last few years,” Rudess said. “When I had my guitar out there, I didn't really know how to record the guitar yet, because I was always working with MIDI but I thought, you know, I mean, we just tried to do something.”
“Embers” is my favorite track on the album and not because it’s the most accessible, although it is. Payne delivers an emotional vocal performance, while Rudess shows he can write memorable melodic songs in addition to incendiary shredding. It was the first song Rudess wrote for the new album, partnering with Moises.ai, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that uses audio separation to isolate components of a song.
“I was talking to my friends at Moises, who I'm an ambassador for, and they wanted to come up with a contest where they could put out a song with an artist — in this case, me — where we can open it up , Rudess explained. “What you do is you can upload an audio file, and then when it comes back to you from their system, it separates it, so all of a sudden you have access to separate vocal, separate drums, separate bass, guitar, anything like that. So, we wanted to have a contest where somebody can pull out a track and then put their own track in there. So I wanted to write something that was not that complicated, because people were going to be trying to do their own tracks. I realized after I wrote it, though, that there's a lot of chord changes in that song. It’s not that easy. But it’s also not in like 13/8 time.”
The second single from the record is “Shadow of the Moon,” another showcase for Payne’s dreamy vocals. The soaring chorus harmony vocal is breathtaking.
“Eternal is the album’s second-longest track at nearly nine minutes long. It opens with an extended musical intro for nearly three minutes before at atmospheric vocal passage. The back half of the song has some ELP influence, and there are a lot of twists and turns. I’ll admit I haven’t fully connected with this one yet, but I think it will eventually crystalize with repeat listens.
“Footstep in the Snow” is another great showcase for Payne’s vocals and it has my favorite poetic lyrical line.
A footstep in the snow
Each detail chiseled clear as day
Sure as winter turns to spring
This too will melt away
It’s a gorgeous, four-minute ballad and the final vocal track on the album.
Closing song “Dreamer” is the only instrumental track on Permission to Fly. However, it’s not the high-octane, keyboard fest one might expect. It’s a soaring, orchestral piece, calling back to Rudess’ childhood spent studying classical music. The song lives up to its title and brings a gentle conclusion to a terrific solo album that doesn’t sound like a solo album.
Permission to Fly is a seamless album. What I mean by that is that despite having all the variety one might expect from the solo album by such an accomplished musician — tempos, instrumentation, etc. — it also has a consistency that typically comes from a band that has been together for a while. The songs, for their differences, all sound like part of a cohesive whole. While I’ve enjoyed previous albums by Rudess, this one seems like it will get more listens as a result.
And this formula is something that Rudess wants to continue to see where it goes in the future.
“My plan is to do more, you know, with these guys, right? Because we kind of set it up like this is a band, and it comes off that way as well. And I think it really, really works,” he said. “So, I really wanted to do that. It was very, very intentional to make that happen.”
Although there won’t be any live tour dates to support Permission to Fly, Rudess, who is preparing for a major tour with Dream Theater, said he would like to see if there’s an opportunity to do some live shows after a second album with this lineup in the future.
The album is available in physical formats, including a CD digipak version and a gatefold double album, with bonus tracks.
Tracklist:
The Final Threshold (4:08)
Into the Lair (9:31)
Haunted Reverie (5:14)
The Alchemist (8:36)
Embers (4:03)
Shadow of the Moon (5:29)
Eternal (8:53)
Footstep in the Snow (4:02)
Dreamer (5:03)
Incarnation (3:31) - Bonus Track
Chopin Fm (5:33) - Bonus Track
For more information on Jordan’s work, visit jordanrudess.com. You can also follow him on Facebook at JordanRudessOfficial or at @Jcrudess on Twitter and Instagram.
For my full interview with Jordan Rudess, check out the video below or download/stream Episode 136 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. In addition to the new album, Jordan discussed joining Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment, his musical history, how he came to work on David Bowie’s Heathen album, his thoughts on artificial intelligence in music, and more.
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