How much material has ended up on the cutting room floor during the sessions for Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence?
MP: One example that comes to mind would be The Glass Prison, which originally ended with a drum solo. We ended up cutting it during the mastering stage. Originally, at the very end, right after the vocal line that says: “the door was wide open” – it went into a 20 second drum solo, and then the band came back in to play the final riff one last time. So actually every version of The Glass Prison that was used in the studio always had it, even Kevin Shirley’s original mixes had it. It wasn’t until mastering that we chopped it off and took it out.I had it taken out because it just sounded so arbitrary to me once the lyrics were added. As you know, we write all the music instrumentally before writing the lyrics. So when The Glass Prison was in instrumental form, the drum solo seemed cool there. But once the lyrics were written, it seemed out of place. It seemed so much more powerful to just end with a downbeat right after that last vocal phrase.
Related Questions
- What would the track listing have been if Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence would have had to have been a single disk release?
- Were there any extra tracks left over from the recording sessions of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence?
- How did Dream Theater go about writing the title track to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence?
