I couldn't make just a one CD edition. Gotta have the whole thing. If I don't have time to listen to it all, I just pick up where I left off.
Same here. Actually I end up in the mood for one song say The X Aspect, then I wind up listening to the rest of the disc. I can actually listen to all of these songs on their own.
Sometimes I do the exact same thing. And I can listen to them on their own as well.
Every song, besides the NOMAC tracks, has something i really like, wheter it be the atmosphere, a riff, melody, rhythm. My favorite at the moment is Road to Revolution, love how it starts bombastic, gets soft, and ends on an uplifting edge with all the characters.
Yeah - that particular track is one of those that took a little time to grow on me. I didn't dislike it at first, but I thought of it as more "expendable" so to speak. But at some point I started to appreciate it as it's own song and really got into it.
I see them as not really songs, but scenes of a story I feel like listening to. Its like the famous scene/song from The Phantom Of The Opera.
I totally get a Les Mis vibe from the whole thing.
I went from loving it, to really really meh, to liking it more than meh.
Believe it or not, I think my main problem with it is that it really feels like this story and this project WANTED to be even bigger, but as the “super ambitious project” starts getting this life of its own, you have two choices. Cut all the fat and make it extremely concise and focused (which would inevitably draw comparisons to SFAM) or go all in and make it a full blown play. Either one probably would have been slightly better than what we got. Some of these songs and ideas seem unfinished somehow. And so I think they should have either been finished, or been cut. Make it a full blown 3 hours, or just one. But what we got was halfway between, and I think it shows.
It was a 3 hour idea that got “chickened out” on IMO.
I still think it’s pretty good. And if nothing else, it proves that Dream Theater is not spent as a creative force. As long as John and the boys are willing to challenge themselves, it’s OK that it doesn’t go all the way sometimes.