Time for the very obvious number 1:
1. Space-Dye Vest (Awake)
2009: Awake is weird as fuck, Space-Dye Vest makes me feel uneasy
2010: Awake is a very good album, Space-Dye Vest is a gorgeous song but is it ever depressing or what.
2011: Awake is my favorite Dream Theater album. Space-Dye Vest is beautiful. I'm too scared to look up what's it really about, although I have many theories, and I am too scared to look up Kevin's post-DT work so I don't get disappointed.
In the beginning of 2012 (and the end of 2011 really) some pretty depressing and, at the time, quite unbearable things were going on. I needed something for comfort and company, and I reconnected to Dream Theater, and especially to this song, listening to it for fifty times in a row sometimes when I didn't feel like doing anything else (or felt like doing too many bad things). It is quite full of pathos, and tragedy, and even hints of subdued rage, and it was comforting to be reminded you're allowed to feel that way. Some people look down on others expressing they feel that way, but being naturally a bit naive, open, emphatic, and finding open displays of strong emotion quite brave, I connected to it and it comforted me a lot.
I had several friends tell me, in regards to the lyrics of the song, that it's a quite silly song to fall for - "what, a guy fell for a girl pictured in a magazine, how fucking lame" - and I always tried to tell them that's it's really not all about that, it's about breaking up with the Past (or a past person, if you will), but even more about this now unrequited love which finds its home in an object which "stays on the page", and questioning where to go from Here in general. Secretly, I thought that maybe their, simpler explanation was the true one, and that I was projecting a lot of my own feeling into it, until I ran into a quote which I'll share because I am the quoteperson (duh):
I was looking through a clothing catalog and saw a picture of a girl modeling this piece of clothing called a space-dye vest. And, so, I fell in love with her [laughs] for some strange reason and so the minute I did that, the minute I was just like obsessed with this person, I was like, 'why am I doing that?' and I noticed that I was doing it a lot lately. And I think the prime reason that I was doing that, and this is what I figured out at the time, was that I had just come out of a relationship where I'd gotten dumped, basically, and so I think the situation was that I wasn't finished giving all that I was ready to give, so I was just, like, throwing it around, you know, just aiming it in different directions. It was a total case of projection. And this song is just trying to sort it out and just kind of admitting that I'm just kind of lost. So it's kind of a dark song. It was very cathartic though.
The MAIN reason, however, that SDV is my favorite song, is (I'll put it quite vaguely because it's not something that is really clear to me most of the time, and when it becomes clear, I feel inept to find the right words to share it with everyone) that the song pretty much sounds like it's the end of the world. But we know it wasn't, that there is no one in the world who was forever closed after declaring they'd never be open again, that life goes on and so do the people in it. I find that thought quite comforting.