Something New Hidden In Something Old.

One of my all-time favorite songs is The Great Debate by Dream Theater (Disc 1, Track #4 from their 2002 album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence.) It’s 13.75 minutes of Grade A 100% pure concentrated AWESOME!

I’ve had this CD for 6 years and I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times. I eventually gave up studying each individual part, trying to figure out the timing to its complex polyrhythms and changing time signatures, and I learned to just sit back and enjoy it as a whole. But last night in the car without even trying I discovered something I’ve never heard before, and that makes me extremely excited.

It’s nothing huge. At 9:58 during the transition from the keyboard solo to the guitar solo, the drummer clicks his sticks together a few times. (Quarter notes in 6/8 I believe, but then it switches (again) to 4/4 for the guitar solo. The real prog geeks out there can correct me if I’m wrong, and I know they will. They are prog geeks after all.)

That’s it. In a complex blizzard of notes I found about 8 clicks that I had never noticed before and that made me giggle like a little girl and rewind the CD to hear it again about 3 times. That’s just how I am.

In other news: Dream Theater entered the studio this week to begin writing/recording their 10th album.