| Beneath the Surface | |
| A Dramatic Turn of Events | |
| Length | 05:26 |
| Working title | (Unknown) |
| Release date | 13th September 2011 |
| Lyrics | John Petrucci |
| Music | John Petrucci |
| First live performance | The Warfield, San Francisco, CA, USA, on Sept. 24, 2011 |
| Total live plays | 48 |
| Recorded | Cove City Sound Studios |
| Other appearances | Live at Luna Park |
| Previous song | Breaking All Illusions |
| Next song | Dream Theater (album) |
Beneath the Surface is the ninth and final track on Dream Theater's eleventh album, A Dramatic Turn of Events, and was solely written by John Petrucci.
An atypically soft coda, added because the band felt that Breaking All Illusions didn't offer the album enough closure, Beneath the Surface was written separately from the rest of the album, and was brought in by Petrucci as an idea that was already more or less fully formed.
The song features acoustic guitar and rousing orchestral keyboards. John Petrucci recorded this song using a 6-string guitar in standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E).
Lyrics[]
Is there ever really a right time? You had led me to believe Someday you'd be there for me When the stars above aligned When you weren't so consumed I kept looking for the clues So I waited in the shadows of my heart And still the time was never right Until one day I stopped caring And began to forget why I longed to be so close And I disappeared into the darkness And the darkness turned to pain And never went away Until all that remained Was buried deep beneath the surface A shell of what things could have been Tired bones beneath a veil Of guarded secrets all too frail Sad to think I never knew You were searching for the words For the moment to emerge Yet the moment never came You couldn't risk my fragile frame Until one day you stopped caring And began to forget why you tried to be so close And you disappeared into the darkness And the darkness turned to pain And never went away Until all that remained Was buried deep beneath the surface I would scream just to be heard As if yelling at the stars I was bleeding just to feel You would never say a word Kept me reaching in the dark Always something to conceal Until one day I stopped caring And began to forget why I longed to be so close And I disappeared into the darkness And the darkness turned to pain And never went away Until all that remained Was buried deep beneath the surface Beneath the surface
Trivia[]
- Other tracks that were not written with the entire band present include Wither and The Silent Man by John Petrucci, and Vacant by John Myung and Jordan Rudess, although Vacant was based on an idea from Stream of Consciousness. You could arguably include the entirety of A Dramatic Turn of Events in this list, as new drummer Mike Mangini was absent from the writing sessions.