Background
Fates Warning guitarist Jim Matheos originally started work on Office of Strategic Influence as a side project while his bandmates took a break before starting work on their next album. Matheos decided to work with Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy because the two had wanted to work on a project together for some time. They originally planned to form a supergroup, envisaging the album as "straight prog metal".
Matheos spent seven months writing material for the album. He then sent Kevin Moore (who was living in Costa Rica) some MP3 files of the music he had written and asked him to write some keyboard parts. Moore (known as a founding member of Dream Theater and for his solo career as Chroma Key) had previously performed on three Fates Warning albums, and Matheos was expecting him to write keyboard parts as he had for the Fates Warning album. Instead, Moore "messed with tracks and switched things around and put vocals to it and stuff like that." He said that he no longer considered the keyboard, bass and guitar parts separate from each other: "I don't write like that any more as much as I'm composing a whole song." The resulting track would become "Hello, Helicopter!"
Moore emailed his work back to Matheos, who was "pleasantly surprised" to be sent something completely different to what he expected. Matheos wanted to create a heavy album; before deciding to takes Moore's ideas further, Matheos and Moore wrote what would become "OSI". Moore said that after that, " was pretty much comfortable with whatever I wanted to do." This new song format was very different to what Portnoy and Matheos originally planned: the already-written long tracks were split into multiple short songs, closer to Moore's project Chroma Key than traditional progressive metal. "The Thing That Never Was", a track on the bonus disc, shows the direction Matheos and Portnoy originally planned to take the album in.
Matheos and Portnoy initially considered having a different vocalist perform on each track; this idea was scrapped as they decided the constant change in vocalist would disrupt the flow of the album. Vocalists considered included Steve Walsh, Steve Hogarth, Steven Wilson and John Arch. Portnoy particularly pushed for Daniel Gildenlöw to sing on the album. Early on in the album's production, Gildenlöw wrote some vocal melodies and lyrics for two songs and completely wrote another song. Matheos liked Gildenlöw's ideas, but did not want to take the music in the same direction Gildenlöw did. Moore ended up performing most of the vocals on the album. In order to keep the album from becoming too similar to Chroma Key, Matheos and Portnoy decided to have feature a guest vocalist on one track. Steven Wilson (of Porcupine Tree) wrote lyrics and performed vocals on the track "ShutDOWN". He was chosen because his music in Porcupine Tree was similar in style to the music on the album. Portnoy also credited Wilson as "a pioneer of his genre".
Bassist Sean Malone (of Cynic and Gordian Knot) was only credited as a guest musician. Portnoy explained that this was because Malone's schedule did not allow him to join Matheos, Moore and Portnoy in the basic tracking sessions.
Read more about this topic: Office Of Strategic Influence (album)
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