First and foremost, with everybody we wanted to see if they can pull off the songs, play them correctly, and that they it felt right musically. That's something Mike [Mangini] did, it felt like the band. He really gets the style and delivers in a powerful metal way.

I've always said that there's a huge progressive rock, progressive metal audience out there, in the world.

When we came out, the kind of music that was popular was Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, all that stuff. That was when we released our second album, 'Images And Words', and it was something people werent used to hearing maybe, and it sort of rose above all that somehow, being progressive, or whatever.

You try to play the song better than you had before.

Jordan Ruddes does [have a home studio], but it's all self-contained. I'll be the only guy with a fully built recording studio. So they'll have to come to me.

We're not the kind of band who writes an order abundance of songs and picks from them, we usually write for the album.

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.