Awake (Dream Theater Album) - Songs

Songs

The album's opening track, "6:00", features lyrics written by Moore, hinting at the growing distance between him and the rest of the band. Petrucci wrote the lyrics of "Innocence Faded", inspired by his deteriorating friendship with Moore. "The way I wrote lyrics a lot of the time is that I'll take an initial spark of an idea... But then I'll kind of generalize and add in other situations," Petrucci said. "So I couldn't say it was solely about that, but it was definitely inspired by that. There was a feeling of it not being the same way it had been, and the realization that things were not always going to remain the same."

"Erotomania", "Voices" and "The Silent Man" form a three-part suite titled "A Mind Beside Itself". Portnoy stated that the instrumental "Erotomania" was written "off the cuff" as "a bit of a joke and parody". Petrucci penned the lyrics to "Voices", dealing with the subject of mental illness. He researched schizophrenia and similar disorders and used religious terms "to make things more vivid". "When I was writing it, I saw these terms and medical things that were just brilliant," he said. "Like there was a guy who felt that his skin was inside out. I read that and was like 'Oh my God! That's unbelievable; I've got to write about that.'" Petrucci wrote the music and lyrics to the acoustic "The Silent Man". LaBrie described the lyrics as dealing with "communication breakdown, for instance between a father and a son. We feel that we have to play certain roles when around one of our parents, and we never really get to know the real person. I'm lucky that I behave with my own father like I would a friend. We can joke around and go for a beer."

Portnoy wrote the lyrics to "The Mirror", describing his battle with alcoholism. He would return to the subject on later Dream Theater albums with his Twelve-step Suite. "Lie" was originally part of "The Mirror", but LaBrie thought it was strong enough to be a song in itself. "I remember one of the first tapes sent me to start jamming with up in Canada was 'The Mirror'," LaBrie said. "We used to jam instrumentally to it on the last tour and then we built it into a song, with the lyrics and melodies but also within the song was 'Lie'. I heard this groove and I was going 'Oh my God, that's a song in itself!' So I called up the guys and said 'Man, I really feel strong about this song. Can't we take that groove and build a song?'"

"Lifting Shadows off a Dream" began as a poem and two chords brought to the band by Myung. "We worked on it, racked our brains, recorded the jam and by the end of the night we were like 'Ahh fuck it. This sucks,'" Petrucci recalled. "We came by the next day, listened to the recording and thought it could be really cool. All of a sudden it evolved into this song."

"Space-Dye Vest" was written by Moore, who brought the piece into the studio as a completed song. "Kevin Moore saw this photograph in a fashion magazine of a beautiful model wearing a space-dye vest and he fell in love with her," LaBrie said. "He carried that magazine around with him for ages, but he realized that the only way the innocence could be kept, so that he could retain that love for her, was if she stayed on the page. If he'd met her, all that would have been lost." Portnoy recalled that when the rest of the band first heard the song "we thought it was so very, very different we didn't think we even wanted to fuck with it." He said that if they had known Moore was going to leave the band, they would not have included it on the album. Portnoy considered "Space-Dye Vest" "totally 100% song", and for that reason the band would never play the song live without Moore. The song was performed live during a Jordan Rudess Concert, with James LaBrie as special guest, but has never been played in a Dream Theater concert by the full band.

Awake is to date, the only Dream Theater album to have lyrical contributions from all five then-current members.