Lost Not Forgotten Archives: The Making of Scenes from a Memory - The Sessions (1999)

Lost Not Forgotten Archives is the official bootleg series Dream Theater run themselves. This is its twenty-first entry, and what it holds is not a concert: it is the making of Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, their album of 1999. That fifth record was conceived as their first concept album, a way of stating plainly what the band was. It grew out of "Metropolis Pt. 1" from 1992's Images and Words into a rock opera about reincarnation, and it is often called the best thing they have made. What is here is the drawing board: demos, writing sessions, rehearsals and takes that did not survive, laid out in something close to the order they happened. A live rehearsal that runs section A of "The Dance of Eternity" over and over; choir-session outtakes and a James LaBrie vocal demo for "The Spirit Carries On"; the first complete run-through of the first half of "Home". To an ear that knows the finished record, it is very clear which parts had not yet been decided. The recordings had been sold once before, in a limited run on the band's own Ytsejam Records; this edition is newly mastered and newly packaged. Sony Music Labels released the Japanese pressing on 4 October 2023 as a limited run on high-quality Blu-spec CD2, SICP-31638, with InsideOut Music following abroad on 6 October. Fifteen tracks, about an hour and seventeen minutes.