Dream Theater Gift Us with a New Song, “The Gift of Music”
Not only does the artwork for Dream Theater’s new album The Astonishing have a ton of balls on the cover, but the album itself is pretty damn ballsy: it’s a double-disc, 34-track (!) rock opera set in the year 2285, the concept of which pits The Ravenskill Rebel Militia — a group of malcontents on the outskirts of “The Realm” — against the oppressive Great Northern Empire of the Americas. Dream Theater have launched a mini-site for the album complete with character descriptions, maps, videos, etc, all set to be released over time in the run-up to the album’s release. It’s quite an undertaking!
The band just released a song, the first we’re hearing from the album, called “The Gift of Music.” Musically, it reminds me of disc two from Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence; upbeat, (mostly) major key, a good hook and a tactful, swift JP shredfest solo. Classic DT. Lyrically, it seems like it’s setting up the story to unfold over the course of the album: future high-tech society, the rebels’ discontent growing, and music somehow playing a central role in that.
I fucking love it. How rad that DT are taking on something so ambitious so far into their career? It’s been since 1999’s fan-favorite Scenes of a Memory that they attempted something on such a large scale. Speaking of which, says John Petrucci in an interview with Rolling Stone (of which you read the whole thing):
The idea to do a concept album as a band felt right. The last one we did [1999’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory] was about 15 years ago, and it really felt like we were in a good place to do this. I knew that what needed to happen, first and foremost, is that we had to have a story to base this on, because the idea of basing an album off of a loose concept or something that was sort of arbitrary, that didn’t interest me at all. I wanted this not only to be a concept album, but really to write a full show. And to have all the elements in place, the story needs to drive that. We needed to have the storyline, a plot, places, characters, maps — you name it.
So that started about two and a half years ago; it took about a year for me to get that story done and ready to present to the guys. And I wanted to write from a place that was familiar to me, so I knew that music had to play a role in the story somehow. I’m a huge fan of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, so I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go. But it was a matter of really diving into it and working on it, revising and revising again, and working on it every day until I had something solid.
And, on the music itself:
Because of the sheer volume of music — you’re talking, when all’s said and done, probably two hours, 10 minutes’ worth of music — every step of this has been a huge process. I don’t think I’ve had time to do anything else over the last year or so [laughs]! In order to do this right, I had to be really, really organized about it. Jordan and I wrote the music as really a prog-metal score to the story. We didn’t sit down and say, “Let’s write a song, here’s the first chorus, whatever.” We would go through the story and say, “What’s happening here, where is it taking place?” We had to make sure the mythology was right, the timeline was right. And that carried through on every level. When it came to presenting the orchestration to David Campbell and getting him involved; when it came to writing the lyrics, and then me having to go through it song by song, character by character; even things like the artwork, creating the map and all those different towns and cities and roads — every sort of level and layer took a lot of organization and focus.
Jam it below via Rolling Stone. The Astonishing comes out January 29th via Roadrunner.
