I'd like to see them do what Rush did for the Time Machine tour. Release a couple of new songs in late Spring and perform them during a short warm-up tour. Then do the full-on world tour for the album after its release in Fall 2024. That way, we wouldn't have to wait almost a year to hear at least some of the new material.
Depending on how things go, that is always a possibility. For later tour cycles with MP, they kinda did that. The album was already in the can, an announcement was made about the upcoming album, and the band would do a warm up leg including between 1 and 3 songs in the setlist, with the rest being legacy tracks. Depending on how quickly everything comes together in the studio, I could see them doing something like that in time for at least some of the European festivals during the summer months, and in between festivals, filling in with some headlining gigs, perhaps in less common cities that would otherwise get looked over when they do a proper tour with full production.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much logic was put into the timing of the announcement.
You could be right.
But maybe they made the announcement right after they told MM of their decision or something like that. I don't know but I could see a number of reasons behind it including none at all lol.
I tried to find out when he was told, but I couldn't get it, but I believe he likely knew for about a month before the announcement.
I also believe that he gave them a drop dead date of when his press campaign for his solo album was going to hit, which just so happened to be the day after DT's announcement. His press campaign was surely going to refer to him as "Ex Dream Theater member Mike Mangini". Even though he did some interviews before the announcement, I firmly believe that it was a done deal, but he didn't let on out of whatever agreement they had.
I'm sure there was a specific reason for why they made the announcement when they did, especially given that the timing was unusual with MP in the middle of a tour in another part of the world and them having to photoshop him into the image with the rest of the guys. The mystery is why which could be everything from getting ahead of a leak to showing MM some courtesy tied to the announcement/release of his solo album. Would be interesting to know, but hard to say if that will ever be revealed.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure MM knew about it at least a few weeks before the announcement was made. All you need to see is Rodrigo's interview with MM and how he choked up when the topic of DT was brought up. I also listened to the "emergency" episode of the Talking Into Infinity podcast the day of the announcement, and they brought up a couple interesting points. MM ended up doing an interview with them 5 or 6 days before the announcement. In the lead up to the interview, MM's publicist specifically told them not to bring up DT in the interview at all (unlike when Rodrigo did his interview a few weeks before) which wasn't completely unsurprising. But then the publicist kept hammering that point home repeatedly in the days before the interview, which was a bit unusual. The TII guys also commented that they noticed MM didn't seem to be his usual jovial self when they saw him on the DreamSonic tour. I don't want to misquote them, but IIRC, it seemed like he was either somewhat detached from everything and/or was all (or at least mostly) business unlike at previous shows. So they hypothesized that perhaps MM even knew as far back as during that tour. Here's the link to the podcast for those that wanna check it out for themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQuOl5EfYhMIncidentally, Rich Wilson makes an unscheduled appearance on there, too.
Topic: Is DT missing an opportunity to cash in.... (Read 4367 times)
