Mike Portnoy

“I tend to like the heavier things, especially live on stage. I need that energy and interaction and feeling the audience.”

“I am not a technical drummer at all. I'm more from the Keith Moon/Lars Ulrich school of, 'Hey, look at me!' I just get up there and bash.”

“People always say to me, 'Well, how can a marriage last when you're away as much as you are?' And I always say, 'Well, absence makes the heart grow fonder.' That time apart from each other has actually strengthened our relationship.”

“In Adrenaline Mob there are five guys that are all absolutely insanely energetic performers each of their own right. It's like a five-ring circus on stage!”

“I always follow my heart.”

“One of the reasons I needed to leave Dream Theater was because I didn't want to end my career as just the drummer in one band.”

“Every band goes through breakups or splits.”

“Dream Theater was my baby. I formed it from the beginning, out of college, and I lived a lifetime with them.”

“I don't like when I see bands that are just a memory of what they used to be, and there's a few out there that I've seen recently that are still touring... I'm not gonna name them, but some of the members can barely play their parts, and then they have a lot of other members that weren't even originally in the band.”

“My love for Yes is pretty well-documented.”

“I kind of always made it a tradition, whenever Dream Theater played Toronto, to play a Rush cover.”

“I can't possibly overstate how much influence Rush had on me as a young teenager. I would say from about 1981 to 1987, they were my gods.”

“After I wrote 'The Best Of Times' for my dad and after I completed the '12 Steps Suite' with Dream Theater, I very much felt like I had said everything I wanted to say lyrically.”

“I love playing drums and helping out.”

“With Dream Theater live, I may have been a bit of a focal point because I absolutely live for the energy on stage, and having interaction with the audience is absolutely crucial to me - regardless of how some others have described it!”

“When you're putting together a concept album, it's all about the flow and the story.”

“I'd just like to be remembered as a huge music lover.”

“My lesson would be to not sell yourself to anybody else and stay true to yourself.”

“I don't care about technique. I have kind of been pigeonholed as a technical drummer since I was in Dream Theater for all those years, but it's actually very far from the truth.”

“We kind of established in Sons of Apollo right from the get go that it would be a very collaborative process musically, but after that, I was going to take the reins and control everything else beyond that the way I did with Dream Theater.”