This past semester, I took a class on rock music from the 1970s to the present. This was probably the most enjoyable class I have ever taken. The final paper was to write a lecture about a song we wish had been discussed in the course. My paper turned out awesomely and seems like a good fit for this blog, so here it is:
Heavy metal and its various styles have always been one of my favorite kinds of music. I appreciated the class’ coverage of classic metal, but was disappointed that its coverage of contemporary heavy metal music focused only on its dark side, the trend that led to thrash metal, death metal, black metal, and other similarly abrasive styles. I would have liked the course to cover at least one example of the more positive subgenres of metal that I enjoy, namely power metal and progressive metal. Power metal is a melodically focused offshoot of speed metal that formed largely as a reaction against the exceedingly dark tone of death and black metal and features clean vocals and upbeat, epic lyrical themes. Progressive metal combines the complex song structures, unconventional time signatures, and musicianship of progressive rock with the powerful, guitar-focused sound of heavy metal. Of the two, progressive metal tends to be much more musically interesting, and so I’m going to write about my favorite example of the genre: “The Glass Prison”, by Dream Theater.
Progressive metal, of which Dream Theater is one of the main practitioners today, has its origins in the 70s, when it was inevitable that two genres as popular as progressive rock and heavy metal would combine somehow, somewhere. Acts like Rush and Uriah Heep combined progressive rock and hard rock influences to achieve a sound that was as complex and technical as progressive rock, but distinctively heavy in its sound. But artists like these still fell within the progressive rock umbrella and were essentially still mainstream progressive rock acts that happened to sound heavier than bands like Yes and Pink Floyd. The three American bands that largely helped to turn progressive metal into a freestanding genre in the 80s were Queensrÿche, Fates Warning, and, of course, Dream Theater. Queensrÿche was musically influenced by glam metal and became the most commercially successful of the three; Fates Warning drew from thrash and other extreme metal and remained largely underground.
Dream Theater, on the other hand, stayed the closest to its progressive rock origins, at least initially. Since making their landmark album Images and Words in 1992 in the middle of the popularity explosion of grunge, they’ve developed a more modern, metal-sounding approach while remaining progressive and intensely technical in their work. This new style roughly began in their 2002 album, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and is exemplified by songs like “The Glass Prison”. The album still contains traces of the “old” Dream Theater, particularly in its title track, a 42-minute epic in eight movements exploring the lives and struggles of six eponymous people dealing with mental illness.
At nearly fourteen minutes in length, “The Glass Prison” is fairly long even by the standards of Dream Theater. It’s divided into three main movements and an instrumental section, and one of the more striking things about the song is the minimal level of repetition present. Each movement sounds quite different from the others, and they have little repetition within themselves; at most some form of a refrain that comes back once and is forgotten. The band’s virtuosic instrumentalists have very short musical attention spans, constantly shifting riffs and even time signatures. The result is a song packed with more detail than many an entire metal album, constantly changing from one moment to the next and rarely crossing back over its own path.
The other immediately striking thing about the song is how, despite its unusual length, it never relents from its intensely heavy, powerful sound. While it resembles a progressive rock song on a large-scale, structural and compositional level, it’s unmistakably metal at its finest in its actual sound. Crunching riffs, fast-paced shredding, and rapid-fire bass pedaling, all hallmarks of modern metal, are present here. On his website, drummer Mike Portnoy explains that the song was the band’s attempt to write a song that stays “concentrated on heaviness from start to finish without really ever letting up.”
The lyrics to the song are something else yet. “The Glass Prison” was written by Portnoy about his recent recovery from alcohol addiction. The three movements correspond to the first three steps of the twelve-step process of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. Dream Theater’s lyrics have always been wide-ranging, covering topics from philosophy to mythology to current events, but personal experiences are a significant part of their songwriting, especially in recent years; this is a very personal song, at least on a lyrical level.
The first movement, Reflection, describes the speaker realizing that his life has been taken over by alcohol. Whereas so much of the heavy metal we’ve discussed focused on power in all its forms, the first movement is all about complete powerlessness: “Hopeless surrender/Obsession’s got me beat/Losing the will to live/Admitting complete defeat”. Instead the power has been taken by the addiction: “Overwhelming, unquenchable/I’m powerless, have to let go”. The combination of these lyrics with the extremely heavy power of the song’s sound is an interesting juxtaposition; right after the line “complete defeat” the fast and heavy main riff of the introduction is reprised, complete with double bass drumming.
In the second movement, Restoration, the speaker comes to believe that there is hope, that a higher Power can restore him from his addiction to sanity and wholeness: “Desperate, crawling on my knees/Begging God to please stop the insanity”. He admits his inability to save himself and turns to God and others to help him break free. “Help me, I can’t break out this prison all alone/Save me, I’m drowning and I’m hopeless on my own/Heal me, I can’t restore my sanity alone”. Musically, this section is slower and less melodically complex than the first, as if it’s humbling itself.
The shorter last movement describes his commitment to submit to God and make every effort to turn his life around: “The glass prison which once held me is gone/A long lost fortress/Armed only with liberty/And the key of my willingness.” The higher Power he believes in is suggested to be the Christian God, as he prays a line from the Lord’s Prayer in the last stanza: “Fell down on my knees and prayed/’Thy will be done’”. Though we’ve only made it through the first three steps of the program, there is already a sense of redemption evident in this song as we’re taken from utter despair and hopelessness to faith and hope for recovery. Overall, the lyrics are a tale of salvation on par with those of ‘70s arena rock, without self-congratulatingly placing music in the position of redeemer.
With all that said, the way the song begins has little to do with its lyrics or its pervading heaviosity. Dream Theater is fond of drawn-out, instrumental introductions, with the vocals sometimes not coming in for up to five minutes. For the first fifteen or so seconds, we hear nothing but static. In their previous album, Metropolis, Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, Dream Theater began a tradition that would unite their next few albums into one “super-album” in which each album ended the same way the next began. Scenes from a Memory is a concept album that ends with the main character being ambushed and killed while listening to a record, bumping the needle and producing the static that carries over into “The Glass Prison”.
The next thing we hear is a mournful-sounding bell, which repeats a few times until it is accompanied by a low-key bass riff. Minus the static, it sounds strangely similar to the introduction of “Hells Bells” by AC/DC, with a similar-sounding guitar riff being played instead of the bass. But where the latter song slowly builds up and evolves around the tempo of the bell and the guitar riff, in “The Glass Prison” the rest of the band suddenly enters from nowhere at around 0:50. After the guitar and drums finish resonating from their entrance, the guitar starts accompanying the bass in its melody and for a few moments, it’s hard not to wonder if Dream Theater is playing a tribute to the classic band.
Then at 1:45, this resemblance vanishes the song slows to a stop before shifting gears entirely to a higher one. The guitar comes in alone to play a new, faster riff, soon accompanied by “galloping” drums. Though it took a while to build up, the powerful sound of the song is here to stay. The drums soon shift to a more normal 2-time beat, with some double-bass drumming thrown in. Thirty or so seconds later the guitar shifts to a more rhythmic riff, which is soon carried on by the bass guitar as the lead guitar begins shredding for a full thirty seconds. Not to be outdone, the drums switch to an even faster double-bass rhythm.
Finally the guitar and drums switch back to the rhythmic riff and, after three minutes of build-up, James LaBrie’s vocals finally begin. Though he is the band’s lead vocalist, Mike Portnoy contributes almost as many lines as backing vocalist, possibly because this is “his” song. Meanwhile, the guitar contents itself with occasionally shifting pitch in its riff. The keyboard, not as present as usual in such a heavy song, plays a swirling, music box-esque melody to accompany LeBrie’s vocals as they shift disconcertingly back and forth between left and right.
For the “chorus” (in the loosest possible definition) of the first movement another, spacier guitar riff comes to light along with more technically insane drumming. Around 5:20, the band simply resonates over a mandolin-like melody before switching back to the slower intro riff. During this we hear sirens, possibly indicating some kind of medical emergency arising from alcohol addiction. The band seems to be building up to the same fast riff we heard at 1:45, but when it should come we instead switch to something completely different: the next movement.
It begins with the guitar playing a simple riff unaccompanied, so distorted as to be almost completely toneless. Soon the drums come in, much simpler than before, along with the keyboard imitating records scratching. We quickly get a sense of the sonic personality of the second movement: slower, perhaps less technical than the first half, but just as crushingly heavy and powerful. The drums set the pace as the guitar shifts between various crunchy riffs to accentuate the transitions between sections of the lyrics. An almost bluesy riff accompanies the “chorus” of this movement, along with the keyboard imitating an old organ. But it’s misleading to call this part a chorus; as it’s repeated, though the vocals are the same, the guitar riff in the middle third is stood on its head into something completely different.
After this repetition, the band shifts gears yet again and enters into the instrumental section of the song. Not content with one, or even two guitar solos, Dream Theater will devote upwards of five minutes at a time to just let its incredibly skilled instrumentalists do their thing, during which time LaBrie will physically leave the stage at shows. What results sound almost like a battle of the bands as the guitar, keyboard, and drums all vie to be the most complex, the most technical, the best-sounding, calling a ceasefire every once in a while to let the bass shine though. Even in a song as heavy as “The Glass Prison”, the guitar and keyboard share the melody roughly evenly.
This lasts until almost the thirteen-minute mark as we transition to the last movement with the return of LaBrie’s vocals. The focus is almost entirely on him and the lyrics as the guitar and keyboard shrink into the background with the surging drums keeping up the power of the song. The song ends abruptly with the shattering of glass, symbolizing the destruction of the glass prison of alcoholism.
Though not Dream Theater’s most well-known song, “The Glass Prison” is exemplary in how fully it incorporates both its progressive and metal roots. Its multifaceted complexity, wrapped in unrelenting heaviness and powerful instrumentation, make it an outstanding combination of the genres. It stands up and walks like a heavy metal song, but upon analysis reveals at least as much detail as a typical progressive rock song. Mike Portnoy would go on to write four more parts to his Twelve-Step Suite corresponding to the other nine steps, bringing it to a near-hourlong tale of his recovery. Meanwhile, Dream Theater continued to develop the metal-centric approach evident in this song, most notably in their follow-up “black” album from 2003, Train of Thought. They have continued as innovators of the progressive metal scene up to the present, breaking into commercial success without changing to fit into the mold of mainstream artists; their latest album, consisting of six songs totaling 75 minutes, reached the sixth spot on the Billboard 200.
As bands like Dream Theater show, the evolution of the diverse genre of heavy metal in the past twenty or so years has been extremely broad-ranging and multidimensional. While extreme offshoots of thrash like death and black metal went underground in much darker directions, grunge and alternative metal remained relatively mainstream in America, power metal plunged headlong into bringing back the melodics of the 80s with fantastical lyrics, and progressive metal essentially did its own thing. Its power, intellectualism, and endless innovation make it a fascinating genre on multiple levels and a testament to the adaptability of the heavy metal sound to do almost anything imaginable.
