Mike Portnoy Quotes

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

A lot of guys come out, and they do the exact same thing, are in the exact same mood, and have the exact same entrance every night, I really just make up a lot of crap as I go along.

I personally don't lock in a performance, because I do leave room for things to happen, so I just make sure I'm very intimate with what I'm saying and why I'm saying it so that no matter what happens, we can do whatever we want to do and leave space for play.

I like to improvise.

You can't plan everything - if I did a performance exactly how I rehearsed it, it would be so boring.

I don't do the same show on any two nights.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

I wouldn't be interested in just doing a show that's mapped out and choreographed with a set list. That would've been boring so long ago it just wouldn't be any fun.

I always give the encore over to chaos, so people can yell out requests and I can hack my way through a song that I don't really know anymore.

I don't write any of my material down. I like to improvise and be spontaneous.

At my shows you have time to relax, time to just enjoy something really dumb, time to laugh at something that's weird or unexpected and time to think. There's all sorts of things happening and it's great being able to go any way I choose at any given moment.

I don't do the same show twice. I've never done a show word for word.

Spontaneity is everything to me, working without a net.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

I didn't know how to play lead guitar. There was a freedom in not knowing how to do it.

If there was a wrong note, it didn't matter as long as it was rocking.

My favorite lineup is just a trio, because then every night you can improvise and change the repertoire. Keyboards and brass can be great, but it puts you in a different ballgame because you're not quite as free. You have to stick to the arrangement of the song.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

I studied structured improv, where you start from one position and see where it takes you. I like spontaneity. If you set yourself up to do the same thing every night, you may not connect as well to a different audience.

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

I didn't want to be precious about things. Of course, the idea is to make great music, but if you have great musicians up there, it gives me some leeway to play around a little bit.

I'm no longer beholden to the sacredness of the recorded song as some kind of ultimate standard by which every performance of the song is measured. I like to diversify, that there are multiple versions of every song. And the songs incorporate a lot of improvisation, and an element of chance, and I think that's exciting. There's no one true formulation of a song, they have various manifestations depending on the space we're in. I like that.