Thursday, June 28, 2012

A Dream Theater Mix-Tape: A Blast from the Past...

Post #202
The year was 1997. At that time Dream Theater's newest album was Falling Into Infinity. I had only discovered Dream Theater a year and a half before, but I already considered myself a die-hard fan. I had collected all their albums on CD, and felt it was a good time to make my own 'Best of Dream Theater' mix-tape. (Yes 1997 was still in the era of mix-tapes; any music fan had tons of these.) I just couldn't wait for them to release a Greatest Hits album...

Nowadays we call them playlists on our handy, portable electronic music-playing devices that hold thousands of songs. Back in '97 though, what people did was record their favorite songs from their CD collection onto a blank cassette tape (or perhaps burn songs on to a CDR, but if you couldn't afford a newer model computer- or any computer- you were stuck with what your dual-cassette CD boom box could do.) Everybody's car had cassette players back then, at least if you were a college kid on a working-class campus. So a mix-tape was a handy, portable, personalized collection of you favorite songs.

For Dream Theater, who are famous for writing very long songs, often exceeding 10 minutes, I needed the 'top-of-the-line' from what blank cassettes had to offer: a 120 minute, TDK, Heavy-Bass Performance, CD BASS cassette. Note that this IS a longer playing time than you can get out of a CDR in music format (80 minutes).

So here is my first 'Best of Dream Theater' music mix, featuring songs from their first 4 full-length albums (When Dream And Day Unite, Images And Words, Awake, Falling Into Infinity), and their EP- A Change of Seasons:

(Side A)
-A Change of Seasons
-A Fortune in Lies
-Lie
-Surrounded
-You Not Me
-Space-Dye Vest
-Hollow Years

(Side B)
-Burning My Soul
-Pull Me Under
-6:00
-Metropolis-Part I
-Lifting Shadows Off a Dream
-New Millennium
-Caught in a Web
-Take Away My Pain
-Another Day

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