In the lead up to Dream Theater’s first Australian tour in almost nine years, and their new live album, Blunt spoke to Mike Portnoy to chat about the upcoming Australian tour, what fans can expect from the setlist, what music the drummer has been listening to and the legacy of KISS guitarist Ace Frehley.
Dream Theater has had one busy year, but that’s not abnormal for the progressive metal titans. In February, they’d release their sixteenth studio album Parasomnia, marking their first studio release since the return of founding member and long-time drummer Mike Portnoy.
Promptly following the release of the album, Dream Theater would march on with the North American leg of their 40th anniversary tour. Throughout the run, the band would pull out a variety of deep cuts from their discography. It would also allow Portnoy to perform songs released during former drummer Mike Mangini’s tenure with the band.
The group would record their performance at the Adidas Arena in Paris, France, on November 23rd, which they turned into a live album and Blu-Ray titled Quarantième: Live à Paris, released today (November 28, 2025).
Earlier this month, the lead single from Parasomnia, ‘Night Terror’, was also nominated for the ‘Best Metal Song’ at the Grammys alongside newer acts like Sleep Token and Spiritbox. This would be the band’s third Grammy nomination, and Portnoy’s first Grammy nod, following Dream Theater’s first win in 2024 with their song ‘The Alien’.
Blunt spoke with Mike Portnoy earlier this month to discuss their upcoming Australian tour, how the drummer feels about returning to the group one year later, and KISS guitarist Ace Frehley’s recent passing, whom the ‘Pull Me Under’ drummer would admit was a hero to him.
Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater Interview
Calling from their home in Long Island, Portnoy was enjoying a brief but needed break in between dates on their North American tour, having just played festivals like Louder Than Life just a few weeks prior. Still, the drummer shared his enthusiasm for returning to Australia with his band more than 15 years later.
“You know, last time those guys were there, they were there without me. And the last time I was there, I was there without them. So it’ll be nice to be back together in Australia.”
With Dream Theater releasing a new live album right before visiting Asia and Australia, fans have been speculating on whether the setlist will remain the same. With over 16 albums of material to pull from (not including demos, collab tracks, or medleys), fans have a wide variety of requests, and the thrill of experiencing Dream Theater live is those deep-setlist pulls. It’s curveballs like this that have kept fans coming back multiple nights throughout the band’s extensive tours.
This also wouldn’t be the first time Dream Theater had visited Australia later in their tour cycle. In 2014, the band would release the live album Breaking the Fourth Wall: Live from the Boston Opera House, recorded during the 25th anniversary of the band’s album Awake and subsequently, the 20th anniversary of their celebrated album Scenes From A Memory.
As a result, Australia would experience a near-identical setlist to the live album. Given that the tour’s anniversary coincided with the promotion of a new album, this was a hard problem to avoid. Still, Portnoy shared that Aussies won’t have a similar experience this time around.
“It’ll be a combination of what’s on the live release that’s coming up, which is pretty much the 40th anniversary show, and [what] we are currently out in America doing with the Parasomnia show,” Portnoy revealed.
“But I’m not going to give too much away, because there’s already enough set list spoilers out there,” he added.
One of the major points of speculation surrounding Portnoy’s return was how the revered drummer would tackle former drummer Mike Mangini’s songs with Dream Theater. Given the difference between the two’s styles, fans wondered how Portnoy would interpret those pieces. Thankfully, as he would share, he’s been appreciating the challenge and enjoying the shake-up from night to night.
“Those Mangini-era songs have been fun for me. It’s something new and unique, you know, which I haven’t played with Dream Theater. So that always provides some sense of, you know, something new and fresh.”
In North America, the band has been playing the entirety of their recent album Parasomnia. Portnoy revealed that while tracks from the album will appear on the Australian setlist, we shouldn’t expect to hear the whole album.
“We’ve also really enjoyed playing the Parasomnia album, as we are on this tour. It was written as a concept album to be performed from start to finish, almost like watching a movie. So it’s been very satisfying doing that. I don’t think we’re going to play the whole thing in Australia, because we have one tour down there to kind of cover everything. But we’ll play a good portion of it, and it’s been really great and fresh playing this new material.”
Having been with the band for almost two years, it felt natural to ask how the creative chemistry has changed. To my surprise, the band hadn’t approached writing new material just yet and were solely focused on putting their all into the tour.
“We don’t write on the road. We write when it’s time to write and make an album,” Portnoy clarified. “We made Parasomnia in 2024. We wrapped it by the end of the summer of 2024, so it’s been over a year, a year and a half or so since we made the record. It was the first thing we did once I rejoined the band. The creative process at that point was really exciting and inspired.
The drummer continued: “We hadn’t made a record together since [2009’s] Black Clouds & Silver Linings, which was almost 15 years prior. So it was very exciting to be making music together again, and writing and creating and arranging music together again. But to be honest, you know, since the tour began a year ago, that’s our focus. When we’re touring, we’re touring. When we’re in the studio, that’s when we’re writing. So they’re very much two separate processes.”
A classic Portnoy staple that fans have come to know and love is the drummer’s sampling of movie clips to set the mood throughout a track and reinforce its theme.
For example, the track ‘Honor Thy Father’ would sample lines from Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia.
“I always loved including movie samples in our songs. I mean, it goes back as early as the Awake album.” Portney shared.
“When we were making this new record, we wanted it to be very cinematic. So actually, I brought in some samples from the movie Waking Life, which was Richard Linklater’s film about sleeping and dreaming. So I figured that would be appropriate, given the nature of Parasomnia.”
He’d also share a slight easter egg: “I hope [my] giving this away isn’t going to open a lawsuit. But the fact is, Richard Linklater’s voice is what closes the Parasomnia album. He gets the last word on the album!”
On the topic of movie samples and Paul Thomas Anderson, we’d naturally steer towards discussing the director’s latest film, One Battle After Another, which had racked up immense acclaim after its release. On social media, Portnoy would go as far as to call it his favourite film of all time. Obviously, we talked about the film’s chances at the Oscars.
“I think it could potentially sweep them,” he shared. “Paul Thomas Anderson has been nominated 11 times, and he’s yet to win. So I think this is the one for him. He should have won for There Will Be Blood, you know, but for whatever reason, you know, I think now is the time.”
While discussing the film, we also talk about other music the drummer has been listening to that might top his irreverent album-of-the-year list.
“Some of my favourite albums of the year are this band from brands called Igor with three R’s. I absolutely love their new album. It’s one of my favourite albums of the year, if not the favourite. It’s kind of like death metal meets European chamber music. It’s really bizarre stuff.”
The drummer would continue: “I like Steven Wilson’s [The Overview] a lot. There’s a band called Blood Incantation, which is like Opaque meets Pink Floyd. The new Cardiacs album, [LSD], is a favourite. That’s a band from the UK, I believe. And they, they hadn’t put out an album in decades. Their main writer [Tim Smith] of the band passed away, and they finally put out a new album of all the stuff that they were able to finish up without him.”
Portnoy would also go on to shout out his son’s band Tallah, which released the album Primeval: Obsession // Detachment in September this year.
The mention of the Cardiacs record brought up how former Oceansize frontman had joined the group, which he called “his favourite band of all time” – Portnoy related to the story, recalling his experience playing with Twisted Sister.
“I joined Twisted Sister (from 2015-2016) after they were one of my favourite bands when I was a teenager. So I had that experience. And then my son had that experience when he joined Code Orange [in 2024], which was one of his favourite bands. So it’s pretty amazing when you have situations like that, that you know that fate sometimes works in strange ways that you can never predict.”
Only a few short weeks before our interview, KISS guitarist Ace Frehley had passed away after sustaining an injury to the head at home. Shortly after his passing, Portnoy would share on social media that Frehley was a hero to him growing up.
“Losing Ace is a big one for me,” Portnoy admitted. “I was a KISS fanatic back in the ’70s. I saw them in [1977] at Madison Square Garden, I saw them in [1979] at the Coliseum. Ace was my first real guitar hero, even though I was a drummer; he was my favourite member of KISS. My nickname in elementary school was Ace. So, it’s been tough one to process.
Portnoy would go on to share that he’d been revisiting their material in wake of the guitarist passing away, and remembered getting to play with him. “[I’ve] been listening to a lot of old, old Kiss stuff and revisiting some of the great old shows that are on YouTube. I was fortunate enough to have played with both Ace and Peter [Criss] back in 2013 when I was the musical director at Eddie Trunk’s 30th anniversary concert. So, I have a lot of history as both a fan and a fellow musician with Ace, and it’s a really difficult loss to process.”
Shortly following Frehley’s passing, Trunk would share that he was in the early stages of arranging a fan concert for the Kiss guitarist to honour his four-decade friendship with the artist.
To close out the interview, the conversation would steer towards Dream Theater’s plans for 2026. Only a short time prior to our interview, Dream Theater released a public statement sharing they didn’t have plans to tour Europe in 2026 as they had previously hinted towards.
In a statement on social media, the band would write: “We know we promised we’d be back in 2026 with our full Parasomnia show, but sadly sometimes plans change… after much discussion, after two European legs on our 40th Anniversary Tour in 2024 and 2025 (as well as EU tours the previous two years in 2022 & 2023 as well), we’ve made the hard decision to skip a return to EU/UK in 2026.”
Portnoy would defend the decision.
“We cancelled our plans. A lot of people misinterpreted that as cancelling a tour. But that tour never existed. It was a hypothetical plan that we had, and we ended up just changing our plans.”
Portnoy would reveal that the band would choose to allocate their resources to other plans that will “be announced soon”.
“The whole January through March window will be for Asia and Australia, and then we’ll have more stuff that will follow that hasn’t been announced yet. The plan all along was to be on the road through next Spring. We started this tour a year ago, in October of 2024, and now here we are a year later. We’re still going here in America, but when all [is] said and done, the entire tour cycle will be about a year and a half, wrapping up by next Spring.”
Despite the lengthy tour and other plans in motion, Portnoy said he was still keen to head back down under.
“[Dream Theater] were there without me last time, and I was there without them last time. So it’s going to be great being back together, back down under.”
You can stream Dream Theater’s new live album, Quarantième: Live à Paris, today or purchase the concert film via the band’s website.
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