David Bryan Quotes

You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

I've always kind of been a little skeptical about bands that won't play their hits. That's really arrogant to me as a music fan. I do want to hear obscure songs, but like most people, I want to hear the hits, so we always play them.

We'll only be playing four new songs live, but all the material for the next album is basically finished.

I don't want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45-minute shows of greatest hits. That would be awful for our legacy.

My shows are always a mix of songs from all my albums with some rocking covers thrown in for fun.

To someone who's more of a surface fan, their favorite songs are the singles. But, we're the kind of band where a lot of the songs that aren't the singles are crazier live.

On our Web site, we have people complaining about us not playing new stuff. But there's so many classic Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, you can't go out and just do a bunch of new things.

Whenever we play new material, eventually some of the songs become classics themselves. They can't become that unless you play them. Any new song is not going to go down as well as some of the old stuff, because obviously the old stuff the fans know inside out.

A lot of the hardcore fans wanna hear the deep cuts - songs like 'Orion' or maybe like a 'Disposable Heroes' - you know, songs that we don't play all the time - and then, of course, they wanna hear 'Sandman' and 'Nothing Else Matters' and some of the hits.

Normally, when I write the setlist for a Dream Theater show, I'll change it up every night, and we can basically play whatever we want.

Initially, in starting to pick the songs for the live show, it was really a matter of picking songs that I loved over the years. As far as the album goes, it happened very naturally.

I loved both [Bob] Seger and the Eagles, knowing why they didn't play some of the songs I wanted to hear. But at the same time, they covered all the big bases, and the stuff that most people had heard. But they definitely had a bunch of album cuts that I wanted to hear that they didn't get around to.

I actually have heard of acts who only do their new album, and don't do their hits. I've never been in that mind set.

When the show opens, fans can text to a number we flash up on the screen, and then we do a meet-and-greet with 60 to 80 people every night. It's something I love doing, and I would say that's probably more fans than most artists bring backstage after a show.

I think fans going to concerts expect more today in terms of meeting and things. It's cool - I get it because of how the Internet has made things much more personal for fans to follow with Facebook, Twitter and everything - but I also think it's kind of hindering because it takes from the music in a way.

When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.

We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.

To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn't have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.

I'm planning a different show, though for obvious reasons some of the material will be the same, and of course I will perform material from the new CD.

It always disappoints me when I go to a concert and they don't play my favorite song, or at least one of their biggest hits.

So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.

We always thought we had to follow a certain theme but I don't agree with that anymore. I think the fans deserve a wider variety of music.

I think we've got three that we have to play, and that would be 'Surrender,' 'Dream Police' and 'I Want You to Want Me.'

We're not one of those bands that throws the names of all their songs in a hat and pulls them out right before they go on stage.

So I usually call the songs when I get on the stage, according to what the crowd feels like to me. I can jump from 50 years ago to right up to now, and people will be familiar with the songs. And since we never do them the same way, it's a new experience.