Feeding the Wheel
"I am a tremendous Terry Bozzio fan, and it blew my mind to have him playing on this record with me. After a couple days of playing with the music he called me up and he really related to 'Revolving Door', because it has a very classical section at the beginning. He's like 'oh man, we can really talk!' And it's really funny, because out of the whole album, that's the classical section, modern classical music, a little bit atonal and aggressive. I think it excited him to do the whole project because his head was in that mindspace as well." "'Revolving Door' has a lot of different styles; it keeps on changing with a lot of different meters. John Petrucci plays some really outrageous guitar solos on it. It was named 'Revolving Door' mostly because - almost like a Dream Theater kind of thing - it keeps on turning stylistic courses. That's one of the more wild and crazy tunes. It starts out with this heavily orchestrated kind of thing. Eugene Friesen and Mark Wood are playing, so you have cello and violin supporting the orchestration. And after it finishes this kind of 20th century classical thing, it goes into a kind of Irish prog riff." 'Crack The Meter' features yet a couple more art rock legends. "That's my radio song," laughs Rudess. "Actually it's a tip of the hat to the prog fusion of old, in the sense that it sounds a little Dregs-y, or like UK. This is also the tune that Billy Sheehan performed on. Steve Morse played on 'Quantum Soup' and he also played the solos on 'Crack The Meter'. And what was a blast about 'Crack The Meter' is that it gave me a chance to do some trading off with Steve, which we used to do a lot of in the Dregs."