Recalling a milestone
Dream Theater tour celebrates 25th anniversary of landmark album
Dream Theater is touring in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of its album “Images and Words.”
“It was the catalyst that really put us on the map globally,” said Dream Theater frontman James LaBrie. “When we first started touring on that album, it was five guys in a van traveling around the States and Canada with our tour manager driving and, you know, bringing us from city to city. It was meager beginnings, staying in flea-bitten motels and playing dives, and then all of a sudden a few months after the album was released, (there was) ‘Pull Me Under.’ Obviously, that song became a hit and it went through the roof on MTV and national radio. It just put us in a whole other realm.”
“Images and Words” became such a success that it allowed the band members to call their own shots and create the kind of music they wanted to create without perimeters or restrictions on who they wanted to be as a band, according to LaBrie.
“When we’re out touring, we’re engaged with the audience every night, because I start telling stories and I like to bring a little more personal side to the band,” LaBrie said. “I talk about the fact that we all truly believe that if ‘Images’ hadn’t done what it did end up doing, would we be standing here on stage today? I’m not quite sure. I think definitely we would have been given the opportunity to do a follow-up album, but I think, you know, if that had received a little attention, not much more than that, I think we would have gone by the wayside. It would have been a completely different situation.”
The band has a “very definitive direction” that it wants to take with its next album, which it plans to release in 2019.
“If you look at ‘Images and Words,’ if you really analyze those songs and their lyrical content, and just look at everything that that album embraces, I think you can see who and what kind of people we were at that moment in time,” LaBrie said. “What was influencing us. What was socially relevant. What were we reading, if any of us were reading any literature that kind of found its way into the songs. What were we going through in our personal relationships, family, friends, whatever. I think each album is a telling of what those people in that band were going through and what was influential or what was detrimental or emotionally taxing, and the same goes for who and what we’re going to be with the next album.”