With regards to the “spontaneous” way of writing music, does Mike ever think that this method doesn allow enough time for songs to mature?
MP: No, I think writing and recording this way makes so much sense. I’ve seen a lot of fans speculate that we’re not giving the songs enough time to grow, or that we’re writing in a Liquid Tension mode where we’re writing them in five days and recording them. That’s not the case. With Six Degrees, we were in the studio for four, five, six months and the songs *did* grow in the studio. Once my drums were laid down, which was the foundation, everything else was able to grow on top of that. A lot of the parts developed on tape; there was time for the songs to grow. And here’s another reason why I think this process makes so much more sense: in the past, whether it was Awake or Falling Into Infinity, we would write a song, demo it and then put it on the shelf for a year. Then when we would go to properly record the album, we were basically learning a song off of a tape. In some cases, it’s almost impossible to reproduce the energy, the excitement and the initial inspiration or spark that w
