By his own admission, Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy doesn't listen to pop music, so when the good people at ever-entertaining drummer's website Drumeo set him a challenge of playing along to Taylor Swift's global mega-hit Shake It Off, without revealing what he was listening to, the prog-metal maestro was more than a little confused. Not least when he's told that the song has already had 3.3 billion views on YouTube.
"It sounds like something out of Disneyland in Japan," he muses, after recording a first take drum part which he admits "is like completely pissing all over someone else's art."
"In my world you have a guitar solo, a keyboard solo, maybe a bass solo," he adds, listening to the track without its rhythm track. "This has a talk solo. What kind of world is this that we're living in?"
Baffled as he may be, Portnoy - whose CV also includes Liquid Tension Experiment, Flying Colors, The Winery Dogs, and a five year stint with Avenged Sevenfold - gamely attempts to play what he imagines the drums on the song may sound like, which, surprisingly, bears little resemblance to what the drums on the song actually sound like.
When the name of the song and the artist who recorded it is revealed to Portnoy, the drummer looks suitably mortified.
"Oh my god, that's Taylor Swift?" he gasps. "Like, only the biggest artist on earth! Wow, I had no idea."
"Taylor, I'm really sorry," he continues "I still would play with you in a heartbeat. I swear I wouldn't do that! I'm sorry I totally ruined your song."
"My daughter is going to get a kick out of this," he adds.
Watching the video below:
And if you fancy watching former David Lee Roth sticksman Greg Bisonette playing along to System of a Down's Toxicity, Megadeth's Dirk Verbeuren creating new rhythm tracks for hit songs by The Killers and Paramore, or Red Hot Chili Peppers' drummer Chad Smith brilliantly reinterpreting songs by Bring Me The Horizon and Thirty Seconds To Mars, Drumeo is your friend.
