I almost rely on other people to say, "Hey, you ever hear of this band?" And I'll say, "Oh, I've never heard of that!" And I listened to them and thought, "What the hell?"

The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.

In Japan they're definitely more over the top. They had four Boogie stacks and 20 guitars. But otherwise it's pretty much the same thing, except there's a translator. It's really nice.

Out of Berklee Dream Theater was born and we've been together ever since. I didn't have to taste that feeling of defeat.

We auditioned a lot of great drummers; every one of them was world class. We had a lot of fun playing with each of them and had some great jams. With Mike [Mangini] it was just something really special about what was going on.

We used to rehearse and that's where the roots of Dream Theater formed. Y'know, we used to play cover songs and jam to [Iron] Maiden and stuff but we were writing songs and it was this metal, loud style and we'd constantly get knocks on our door, because the rehearsal rooms were right next door to each other, and these jazz guys would be like, "Can you guys turn it down a little?"

I went straight out of high school, and when I was 17, all I wanted to do was play guitar.