- Hello! My pleasure entirely! Metal Temple has always been very supportive of Daydream XI's work from the very start and it feels great to be spending some time talking to you. To all the fans out there, I'm forever grateful for the love you constantly share with us. And if you don't know the band already, please feel free to have a listen, connect with us on social media and let us know what you think about it.

- Yes, I get that very often. I guess I am a bit of a workaholic. Not trying to romanticize that or any-thing but throughout my life I ended up turning all my hobbies into work. Singing, playing guitar, writing, drawing…everything became professional at some point. As for Metal Temple, I started contributing with album reviews because I saw that as a great opportunity to get to know some new music and also because I remember how important the reviews have been for my own albums. Whenever someone criticized us it made me think about things and helped me develop my craft. I'm mainly doing this to give back to the community that treated me so well from day one. I do socialize pretty often, love to go out for a drink with friends and did a fair share of partying in my recently concluded twenties. These days like to spend my free time watching movies, cooking, swimming, reading books and learning about all kinds of things, in the company of my family's dogs whenever possible.

- Thanks! We put a lot of effort into those and it does feel good when people still appreciate it. That's a good question, actually. We have two full-lengths written at the moment but we are in a weird transition from being a signed band to going independent. At the moment we are working on a new single to be released in 2020 and we'll see how it goes from there. If we can get a decent deal with a supportive label we'll sure go for those next two records. If not we'll keep releasing individual songs for some time until we can capitalize enough for ourselves to record another full-length.

- That started like a joke. I wrote a short story about Lucifer and his banishment from paradise in the format of lyrics and the guitarist at the time said "this is gonna be a 25 minute song!" because there were a lot of words in there. We started composing around those lyrics and the idea of having a lengthy song like that started to sound plausible because the lyrics asked for it. Most of our influences at the time like Rush, Genesis, Dream Theater, Opeth and Symphony X had these gargantuan tunes for title tracks and the idea itself sounded like a great challenge. And to put that out in a debut album in Brazil, being a Prog band, produced by Jens Bogren and all that sounded like a very ambitious and groundbreaking thing to be done. Two other great Brazilian bands did something similar at the same time. Maestrick and Jack the Joker both released twenty-plus-minute songs in their albums around that same period. In the subsequent years Angra and Sepultura went on to make albums with Jens so I guess we were riding on this trend and the trigger for that was just trying to be like our heroes.

- The main challenge is definitely being in Brazil. Touring in South America is very expensive, quality equipment is scarce and very pricey and the whole metal community is made of people who do things solely out of love for the genre. Since there is not much money involved, for plenty of reasons going from cultural to economic, that makes the industry very amateurish down here. Besides that, another big challenge was to manage relationships in the band. At some point everyone was on the same page but as our twenties started to fade out, people became interested in having families, steady jobs, and financial stability, so being in a Prog Metal band became unmanageable. Still to this day, having a solid lineup is still a challenge.

- Yes, we were very fortunate in that matter. Our first big show was supporting Symphony X in our hometown when we were 17 years old and had a different band name. We later supported Angra, Paul Di'Anno and Andre Matos and before we even released our debut album we went out to play in the US in a big festival with some of our heroes. My favorite performance was definitely Prog Power USA in 2017. Playing that festival was a teenage dream come true and people knew the lyrics to the songs, the venue was packed at 2 PM and we had an hour-long signing session where fans brought things that I don't even own for us to sign. We were very prepared and well-rehearsed so the performance was one of our best to date.

- In all honesty, I can't predict that. It still sounds alien to my ears when someone refers to that album as a masterpiece because I know what's happening in every single bar in every single instrument in every single song. Because I wrote it and produced it, it's hard for me to see it like such a great thing because I also know every flaw in it. I think that the two albums that I've written and are to be recorded in the next years are both a lot better than the Circus. But we're gonna have to see what the fans think about that. Once it's out there, it's not under my control anymore. I can on hope that people connect with it as much as they did with our sophomore.

- I am moving to Los Angeles for two years now, in order to develop my career as a musician and a singer, to explore new places and hopefully get this band on the road for a couple of tours. We'll have a new single out soon and there is a bunch of music already written. I guess the next chapter would be finding a way to finance the next two albums and get out on the road asap.

- I can't really track down to the very start, to what triggered it. But a few things that inspired it were: spending time in the Bahamas with some of Prog Metal greatest; my frustration with people's habit of comparing weaknesses and flaws like it's a game that someone need to win; Kikyz1313's work (the artist that did the cover) and the whole aesthetic of her drawings and paintings.

- The band's ultimate goal and highest dream would become the South American answer to Prog Metal. You think of the genre in the US and you have Dream Theater, you go to Scandinavia and you have Opeth and so on. Down here Power Metal bands throw some odd time signatures in the music and start claiming to be "prog". For me Prog music is about constant motion, innovation, and development. Is more of a mindset than a sonic feature. No formulas. I want people to think of Daydream XI when they ask themselves if there are any Prog acts in South America. But the boundaries we refer to in our bio is mostly musical. I think we've established that already…that this is a band who's never releasing the same album twice.

- Being invited to Progressive Nation at Sea was a complete game changer for us. Before that, Bra-zilian audiences didn't care much about the band. But we were invited by Mike Portnoy and Derek Sherinian themselves. And both have a huge fan base in Brazil. So being acknowledged by such ma-jor names in the Prog scene made us stand out and from that came many great opportunities. I'm forever grateful for being a part of that.

- Thanks for taking the time to do this and thank you for your kind words. And I can promise you, if we ever find those boundaries we'll keep working on bringing them down.