Dream Theater have released the first music video from their new album, The Astonishing, and you can check it out below.
The track, "The Gift of Music," is just a small part of the album's epic 34-track double-disc rock opera.
"The cool thing is that sometimes a riff comes out the first time you start to play it," says Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci in the brand-new March 2016 issue of Guitar World.
"[The 'The Gift of Music'] riff is based off of what was happening in the story. I thought at that point, if you heard the overture, and you hear all of the different themes that are going to happen, this is the first vocal introduction from the narrator, Arhys. So I thought that the riff had to be energetic, lively and positive. I just picked up the guitar and played that riff. It took a little crafting to get it exactly the way I wanted it, but the crux of the riff came right as soon as I had the melody and the conceptual idea.
"Actually, in a bigger sense, having the story to write music to was really liberating, because sometimes you might sit down to write a song and you have no idea what to do. There was never that case here—I knew exactly what to do."
The clip for the song was directed by Wes Teshome and shot in New Jersey, as so many great videos are.
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