Frankly I'd rather hear this band do A Change of Seasons at this point. Reaaaaally not happy that instead I might get Constant Motion and New Millennium.
Agreed and Mike says in the interview the plan was to do A Change of Seasons as the Encore but now dropped it since DT are playing it.... Shame
Of the Dream Theater songs for which you wrote the lyrics, it would be great to hear the two songs about fatherhood, 'Best of Times' and 'Honor Thy Father', as part of the setlist."Those two songs are very important to me on a personal level as well as 'A Change Of Seasons' which I wrote for my Mom when she died in a plane crash over thirty years ago. So, there are three songs right there that have deep personal meaning for me. But, to be honest, I'm not going to do any of those three songs for three different reasons.
"I intended to do 'A Change Of Seasons' as the encore for the Shattered Fortress shows, but I recently found out that Dream Theater was doing it on their current tour, which breaks my heart because it's a song that I wrote about my mother's death that's such a very personal song for me. In any case, once I found out that they were doing it, I pretty much dropped it from my set, because it just felt weird for both of us to be doing it at the same time.
"As for those other two songs, I'm not going to perform those either because they both bring back very heavy emotions to me. 'The Best Of Times' is something that I wrote for my father and played it for him on his deathbed while we held hands and both cried. After he passed away, a few days later, I played it again at his funeral and to be honest, I've not listened to it again since then. It just breaks my heart and it's so difficult for me to hear that song now.
"'Honor Thy Father' is the opposite. It's a brutal hate song that I wrote for a family member and even though those feelings were genuine at the time, since then we've reconciled and I don't want to be exploiting that hate any more; now that I have a good relationship with that person.
"That being said, there's plenty of other songs that I wrote lyrics to in the Dream Theater catalogue to work with. There's literally twenty – thirty songs of mine to choose from for the Shattered Fortress set, for example 'Constant Motion', 'Finally Free', 'New Millennium', 'The Test That Stumped Them All'."