Mike Mangini has opened up about his exit from Dream Theater in an interview with Ollie Winiberg of Drummer's Review – or more specifically, spoke about how insanely calm he was in response to the band's reunion with Mike Portnoy despite some obviously strong feelings on the matter.
Mangini joined Dream Theater in 2010 following Portnoy's departure, beating out a lineup of world-class drummers in a gruelling audition process. A Berklee professor and technical virtuoso with credits in Extreme and Annihilator, Mangini proved himself more than capable of stepping into an impossible role. Over the next 13 years, the band hit new creative highs with him behind the kit.
But when the chance for a long-awaited reunion with Portnoy presented itself, the prog giants didn't hesitate. Fans had been asking for it for years — and as guitarist John Petrucci previously noted, "if they were ever to do it, now was the time."
Mangini said he was proud of the dignified way he handled the split: "Oh, I'm glad you said that. Yes, it was a pretty simple reaction by me. It's just the way I'm brought up and stuff like that. And also, the interesting thing is being able to step outside of yourself. And when I say that, you gotta understand, when you study the brain, the emotional area of the brain surrounds the reasoning area, which surrounds the moral area."
He elaborated on how reason and morality guided his outlook: "So when you study the brain, it's called the moral center, then your reasoning ability, and then your emotions. So when you are tied up with emotion, you can't be reasonable. Just look at the world. And if you don't have a good set of morals, you don't know how to reason."
"If people manage to get you in that emotional area and you haven't really looked into the act of reasoning, critical thinking, and you haven't looked into what's really right and wrong here with a set of, maybe, philosophers behind you and belief systems and all of that stuff, if you haven't even done that, you haven't even asked the question — not who am I, but what am I — I don't think you can wrap your head around this."
Mangini stressed that he never considered airing any internal Dream Theater business once he left: "The other thing is if I'm looking at, let's say, an old-school heavy metal magazine or something — with today, you go online — I just don't buy into anybody in any band revealing things that are family.
"These things happen; it's a closed-doors thing. You don't reveal stuff about your coworkers. I just can't wrap my head around that. So there's that aspect of it, which really didn't apply to me. But it could have. I could have spoken about. It was just, like, 'Okay, next.'"
Looking back, Mangini said he feels the same about Dream Theater as he does about any of his past gigs: "So now I have past bands. It's all the same. You could be talking to me about Extreme, and it wouldn't be any different. You could be talking to me about spending some time in Annihilator. I emotionally feel the exact same way about all of them. It's kind of, sort of a template for me. And I'm on text message threads with the people, and anybody can talk to me anytime they want. It's stuff like that. So it's all just whatever. Seriously."
