TA is the first DT album of which I'll make sure there's no one around when (if ever) I'm putting it on. It's just too embarrasing, I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face when JLB sings 'people just don't have the time for music anymore'. And that's not even the cheesiest moment, far from it.
They said in an interview that they wanted to come with an album of short songs because people don't have the time to listen to long songs. So that is what they've done.
so instead they made a 2+ hour album that people who like listening to whole albums will never have the time to listen to???
I don't know what interview red barchetta is referring to, but I read an interview that says the opposite. They purposely made a two-hour rock opera to FORCE people to listen to a whole album instead of a bunch of individual songs.
Edit: ok, found the interview:
https://rocksverige.se/intervju-john-petrucci-fran-dream-theater/Excerpts:
"The new album (The Astonishing) is quite the challenge to listen to all the way through. I´m thinking these days with everybody having ADD and people can hardly focus on anything beyond 3 minutes. What´s your thought on that?
John: I knew that for sure, exactly what you´re hitting on. First of all, this whole thing was written to be a show and that´s why it´s so long. If we were just doing a concept album, like “Metropolis part 2: Scenes from a memory” (1999), it could´ve been an hour or something like that, but what we wanted to do, is write a standalone show, like we´re performing tonight. If you go to a Broadway show or an opera or something, you´re gonna be there for over two hours, so we couldn´t just write an hour long thing. Basically we wrote two albums worth of material, so that´s number one. Doing that, we knew it would be a challenge. It´s the same thing as watching “Lord of the rings”, you have to put the time aside. The thing that is funny to me, is that there is this underlying theme in the concept about the importance of music and the power of music and also people not having the time for music. I think it´s kinda ironic that you actually have to make the time to listen to it. (laughs)"
...
Listening to the album, you really get the feel of a movie going along with it. Any plans for something like that?
John: Right. When we first started thinking about this, again, it wasn´t that we were just writing an album, we wanted to write something that would cross different medias and could be whatever we imagined it to be and I was always so impressed with rock musicals like “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “Tommy” or “American idiot” and it was like “We´re like the perfect band to do something like this. We´re called Dream Theater.” Doing that, is a goal that´s on the horizon. Being able to score a movie is something that people have always said, “You guys should score a movie.”, but we never did, so it´s kinda like we scored our own thing. To have that turn into something visual like a movie would be awesome. Some of the things that are already in development, are a videogame, which it is perfect for, and a novelization, which we haven´t announced officially, but we´re in talks with that. We´re taking the steps to get there and hopefully it will turn into this other thing.
...
How do you feel about the way music has changed and the way people listen to music today? You were there when bands sold records and now it´s so different.
John: There are two ways to look at it. Back in the day, just for example of having commercial success and charting or whatever, so many records were sold, so the pop artists kinda took over with that stuff. You couldn´t even compete, because they were selling millions of records. Now there are so many less physical sales of cd´s and records, that for a band like ours which such a powerful worldwide audience, we are actually able to compete and we don´t have to sell a million records to chart in top 10, so it´s pretty crazy when you look at that. The thing is, and again it´s the underlying message with this album, music is being consumed in more of a passive way. With streaming and downloading it´s just too easy to kind of make it some background thing, so the idea that we wrote something that almost forces you to have to sit down and listen to it, we used to do that and we base a lot on our own experiences. As teenagers we used to listen to entire Rush albums, entire Pink Floyd albums and shut down the lights and it was great. It was not like today when you listen to a song for 30 seconds."