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Dream Theater -Illumination Theory

Dream Theater - Illumination Theory Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Dream Theater
Released: 2013

Illumination Theory Lyrics

[Instrumental]

[II. Live, Die, Kill]

Consider this question
Look deep inside
Deliver a true confession
What are you willing to live for?

Consider this question
Open your eyes
Examine your own reflection
What are you willing to die for?

When your backs’ against the wall
And the times uncertain
Consider this question
No standing by
When flesh and blood are threatened
What are you willing to kill for?

We seek to understand
We cry with hand in hand

The bridges we build to connect
The distance that makes us forget
Hate dividing us, love reminding us
Of our shared humanity

Hope can be a shadow fleeting
I would rather die believing
Capture it all in a final act of faith

We seek to understand
We cry with hand in hand

A story that needs to be told
An answer that begs to found
The beauty we wish to behold
Is never too far away

[III. The Embracing Circle]

[Instrumental]

[IV. The Pursuit Of Truth]

Mothers for their children
Husbands for their wives
Martyrs for the kingdom
Fighting for your life
A soldier for his country
A junkie for the high
Teachers for their students
Vengeance for a crime
Rebels for their freedom
A tyrant for the prize
Cowards for salvation
Money, love, and faith

Noble embrace
Lay down our lives for the cause
Death over shame
Grace before glory

[V. Surrender, Trust & Passion]

To really feel the joy in life
You must suffer through the pain
When you surrender to the light
You can face the darkest days

If you open up your eyes
And you put your trust in love
On those cold and endless nights
You will never be alone

Passion glows within your heart
Like a furnace burning bright
Until you struggle through the dark
You’ll never know that you're alive

Writer/s: MICHAEL MANGINI, KEVIN JAMES LABRIE, JOHN PETRUCCI, JOHN MYUNG, JORDAN RUDESS
Publisher: Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Illumination Theory

Dream Theater close their eponymous twelfth album with this epic five part suite, which comprises:
I. Paradoxe de la Lumière Noire
II. Live, Die, Kill
III. The Embracing Circle
IV. The Pursuit of Truth.
V. Surrender, Trust & Passion

Guitarist John Petrucci told Ultimate-Guitar.com how he wrote such a multi-part song with multiple movements. "The first thing you start with is that you know you're gonna do that kind of piece," he said. "You go in knowing, 'OK, this is gonna be an epic piece. It's gonna be 20 minutes long.' You know you have room for parts to develop and grow. Once you do that you can get a good idea of the type of shape of it that you want."

He added: "For example in this case, I knew I wanted us to do an atmospheric breakdown in the center with almost like a ballet-sounding string thing just to be totally, totally different in the middle. If you kinda know that thing you have a little bit of a blueprint."

Petrucci told Ultimate Guitar that he already had the main theme for "Illumination Theory" before he started working on it in earnest. "It was, 'OK, this is going to be the theme. This is happening at the start,'" he said. "Similarly with the ending progression that's repeating, that's something we had worked on at a soundcheck in Asia at one point. As soon as we did that, I'm like, 'This will be used for the ending of a song somewhere on our next album.' So you have an idea and you have these little pins like on a map. It's a matter of shaping what happens in-between those moments."

The song's vibey outro was something that keyboardist Jordan Rudess created at home. He told MusicRadar.com : "I was playing it, these three chords, and I loved it. I didn't know what the guys would think, but I played it for them, and John Petrucci was like, 'That's really cool.' So we decided that it would be a neat surprise at the end. It's piano, guitar and Seaboard. It relaxes things after this enormous trip you've been on. So if you're still listening, if you hang in there, that's how we tag it out."

Rudess told Loud Online about this song's classical music influence. "Well," he said, "I come from a Julliard classical music background, I like pieces where motifs and ideas get developed and changed and can be allowed to breathe and that track's certainly not any sort of standard pop song format in any way, shape or form. I just love the fact that we're just really going for it and there's all these kind of progressive parts where there's interesting counterpoints and harmonic changes going on, and I'm also very fond of the fact that in the middle section of 'Illumination Theory,' there's that whole section that really is very ambient and very electronic-soundscapey which leads into a string ensemble part which was actually done with the help my young protégé Eren BaŠŸbuÄŸ, a young Turkish arranger/conductor who took what I had composed on my keyboard and fleshed it out for a string orchestra. And then the string orchestra came into the studio and he came in and conducted them."

"That piece just has so much to it," he continued. "I love when we get deep and it all gets a bit wild, and I also love that in the midst of all that madness, we really let that middle section to really breathe and slow down and be melodic like a movie score."