Song Setlist
REM (2:10): Similar to FAS, created to open live shows. Features light guitars, strings, joyful drumming to introduce an album filled with smiles and happiness.
New Awakening (6:13): Unusual composition to start the album. It is a Progessive Pop Song and features lyrics about a boy who wakes up a morning and gets everything ready to school, takes the bus, enjoys the classes and laughs and has fun with everyone of his little friends at school. Returns and greets his parents and feels happy and excited for tomorrow. Cheesiest lyrics ever made by a human being. Lyrics by: John Petrucci
Conqueror (5:55): A very techno song about a man who is all about watching porn. He watches so much porn and faps so much that he becomes the fastest fapper in the world. roughly 20 cycles per second. Because his constant self-pleasure is paying a toll on his health, he decides to leave his home and meets another guy who casually fingers just about as fast. This other guy teaches him his way with girls. Lyrics by: Mike Mangini
Metropolis Pt III: The Wizard and the Fairy (Isn't this a song by a span...nvm) (11:54): Incredibly difficult prog symphonic song, it deals with a man who practices 6 hours a day to play his favorite instrument, but in the process loses all touch with the entire world. He's a brilliant mind that falls in love with a girl who surprisingly lacks any talent but is just awesome. She drags him out of the music world until he eventually realizes that he's placed in her curse and has two choices, either accept her and live with her but leaving his musical career, or murdering her and going on with his music dream. Lyrics by: Jordan Rudess
Whiteout Blackout (8:51): A man who constantly suffers from stage fright discovers a way to perform and do things correctly without anything going wrong: he just pretends nobody's there and goes along with the ride. The cost? People begin to doubt his humanity and loses many friends in the process. He disconnects from everyone and gets to a point where he cannot communicate verbally with people. To the point where he uses his instrument as a shield to protect his emotions from the outer world. Ballad, and saddest song so far in the album. Lyrics by: John Myung
Plank Walk (7:37): A sailor prays to the heavens for aid in his loot. The gods answer and allow him to earn the power of being feared and respected as if he lived among them. The gods tell him which places to assault and earn loots, as well as how and when. In exchange, they ask him to become their spokesman, the gods were powerful but could not make the people of earth adore them by sheer power, they needed the voice of a mortal. So now the man, everytime he assaulted and looted someplace, was forced to tell everyone that he was a servant of some omnipotent gods. The man regrets this... A line in this song is done by invited rapped Ludacris, who makes a very remorseful voice. Heaviest song on the album. Lyrics by: James LaBrie.
Stream of Anxiousness (10:00): The previous song morphs into this heavy "instrumental", which, with every minute that passes, slowly becomes darker, heavier, more grotesque and with far more and more strange time signatures. Throughout the first minutes, audio samples of children laughing can be heard, like the ones from the first track. Near the end, the wailing and painful cries of agony of many people can be heard, the person is clearly going utterly insane. Samples from a last part describe a person inside a room writing random 13's in the wall.
Falling Into Insanity (26:00): Epic track, split in two main parts of 13 minutes each and each one with it's own variations.
1.- Quiet, calm, but also very erratic and with weird parts which are described as Disturbing. LaBrie's lyrics sound better than ever and clearer. Piano passages and guitar passages form some of the most complex and beautiful things DT has ever done. The lyrics deal with an individual coming to realize that He's not Insane, rather, everyone is. Thus he is placed in seclusion and forced to deal with the aspects of life that brought him there. How he had a family, and how he considered them to be his brothers and how much he loved and admired them, but is ultimately forced to abandon them for reasons he has grown to believe were a conspiration against him from his old friends. Now, forced to switch from room to room, thinks this. He recalls of when he wrote parts for a very long distant song, and convinced himself that he might be stuck in the same place where his other characters where and examines his trip through the different aspects of life.
2.- Agressive, progressive, extreme and very random, the lyrics here deal with the same man accepting that now he can't end that cycle. And recalls when he wrote a story about a man trapped inside something he called an "Octavarium" (thus, this giant song reprises parts from Octavarium as well as having lyrical continuity with Razor's Edge). He feels he's trapped in this process now, where now all he can do is wonder on whether or not he can bring himself to good terms with his inner demons represented by his old friends who left him away. Also wonders on whether or not this is worth it, as when the end cames, the universe ceases to exist, since there is no basis for time and space.
At the end, a slight ray of hope is seen where REM is reprised but with lyrics. He feels he can do something, just hopes to have enough time to do so and that they will take it.
Who wrote the lyrics to this part is left as a mistery and is simply labeled as "Dream Theater"