The Gift of Music

The Astonishing is a rock opera concept album that tells the story of a world set 300 years in the dystopian future where music is made by noise machines. A band of rebels attempt to defy the empire, using human created music as a means to break the mold. This is the lead single from the record.

Guitarist John Petrucci came up with the record's storyline. He told The Huffington Post about it: "Being a musician, and since music is such an important part of my life and people that surround me, I knew that music had to be a central theme," Petrucci said. "That with all the advances in technology, how music becomes less and less important and just really easy to stream and quickly listen to a song and make something up on your phone, or whatever it is." "As the importance kind of went away, I thought it would be really crazy and a travesty if people didn't make music or didn't participate in the arts anymore and it was all artificial; it was all done by machines," he continued. "So that's what this dystopian future in my story… that's the setting of the story. It's about three hundred years into the future and people don't make music anymore; it's done by machines."

The song's music video was directed by Wes Teshome, who has also worked with former The Voice contestant Melanie Martinez on several of her music clips. John Petrucci said: "While we were looking to keep the emphasis on performance, we wanted to be sure that the vibe was unique and special so we found a really interesting location to film in New Jersey that had the perfect atmosphere. By blending in some digital animation we were also able to covey some of the concept from The Astonishing as well. We think it demonstrates the perfect balance of story and performance."