The Brandalz

Awake is the third studio album by American progressive metal band Dream Theater, released on October 4, 1994 by East West Records. It was the last Dream Theater album to feature keyboardist Kevin Moore, who announced his decision to leave the band during the recording of the album.

Much of the material for Awake was written in writing sessions between February and April 1994. Dream Theater were under pressure from their record label to produce an album as successful as Images and Words with a single similar to "Pull Me Under". The label wanted the band to produce a more metal-influenced album, which they thought would be easier to market. John Purdell and Duane Baron produced, engineered and mixed the album. The album's cover, designed by the band, features numerous references to the album's lyrics.

Dream Theater auditioned for keyboardists to replace Moore for the upcoming world tour and eventually hired Derek Sherinian. He had just two weeks to learn two hours of complex music before the tour started. Sherinian initially took up the position on a trial basis and was asked to become a full member during the tour. After the first leg of the tour, vocalist James LaBrie suffered a violent case of food poisoning, severely damaging his vocal chords. His singing became unpredictable, leading LaBrie to become depressed for much of the tour. His voice only started recovering on the tour for Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence in 2002. The band were touring in Japan when the Great Hanshin earthquake hit.

Released at the height of the popularity of grunge music, Awake received mixed reviews; more recent reviews regard the album as one of the band's finest. The album peaked at 32 on the US Billboard 200, the highest position a Dream Theater album would reach on that chart until 2007's Systematic Chaos. "Lie", "Caught in a Web" and "The Silent Man" were released as singles but failed to be as successful as "Pull Me Under" had been. The band's record label considered the album a commercial failure, which would lead to the band being pressured to write more radio-friendly songs on their next studio album, Falling into Infinity.

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 title "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 [the band] 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% [Moore's] song", and for that reason the band would never play the song live without Moore.

taken from : wikipedia