Mike Portnoy Quotes

Rock music is niche.

My favorite type of music to sing and to listen to, you know, rock. It's not always metal, but you know, half the time it is. Metal's cool, you know? Not everybody on 'American Idol' listens to metal.

Good records - from my point of view, where I grew up which was Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull... bands that were pushing the envelope a little - musically and in production.

I'm always into rock n' roll and indie rock.

I love 'Dogman' by King's X and Living Colour's 'Stain.'

What I did with Slash and the Conspirators was a very different kind of music. Genre-wise, it is a step in a different direction.

We grew up with every type of band from Primus to Mr. Bungle to Elton John to pop music to metal, and we try to throw it all in a blender. And whatever comes out of that is more Avenged Sevenfold than metal or metalcore.

I listen to a lot of Pink Floyd, the Doors, Elton John, Sabbath, Metallica, GN'R, Megadeth - just classic rock, classic metal stuff.

I'm jamming 'Black Sabbath Vol. 4' all the time. Zappa's 'Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.' A lot of Gong lately. Some Hawkwind. The Residents' 'Duck Stab' is amazing. Some Fugs. Lots of stuff, man. I'm pretty schizophrenic with records.

I still think the best metal bands have a blues feel. The first Black Sabbath album is kind of a bludgeoning of blues. Deep Purple also started out as a blues band.

To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.

When I was a teenager in the '70s, I was really into those great bands like Led Zeppelin and Queen and Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper.

Now they have banging guitar and no bass and call it rock, but that's not what I call rock.

A lot of power-pop comes out of LA, a lot of speed metal comes out of New York.

I grew up with British rock.

In between 15 and 20 - probably at around 17 - my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didn't get to when I was younger.

If you're an American kid, you can't help but be influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones because they're always on the radio.

You can say that Wayne Coyne sounds like Neil Young.

My inner rock chick has always been there. I grew up listening to a lot of rock music through my sisters, who were teenagers while I was young, so they had control of the radio.

I certainly didn't want to be in a punk rock band, because I had already been in a punk rock band. I wanted to be in a band that could do anything - like Led Zeppelin.

We've always described our sound as a bit more guitar driven than normal pop music. Kind of Pink in a boy band form. We've heard a few people say that so now we use it. I think Pink is amazing person to be compared to.

I never try and sound like Sabbath.

We've been waiting for a format like triple-A where you can hear Crowded House, Joni Mitchell and R.E.M.

AC/DC is a prime example of taking that blues rock thing and just living in that world. They only really move the furniture around a little on each album, but it still works.

I've always loved aggressive, hard, noisy, yet melodic bands, and at the same time I've always loved 'Blue' by Joni Mitchell.