Train of Thought Demos liner notes

After covering two “classic metal” albums on the 2002 tour (Metallica’s Master Of Puppets and Iron Maiden’s The Number Of The Beast), we were in the mood to try and write a similar type of album of our own. We decided that in order to get into the true spirit, we’d get together in a rehearsal studio in New York City before entering the recording studio and bang out the songs in a stripped down, back to basics, loud and sweaty, live and metal rehearsal room the old fashioned way! (Was that enough adjectives?) Over the course of a month or so, the music came together real smoothly and I think we achieved our goal with the overall style of the album.

The only other DT album that was written this way was Awake...

When Dream And Day Unite and Images And Words developed over years because of singer changes and internal problems, Falling Into Infinity was developed over years because of label delays and problems, and Scenes From A Memory, Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, Octavarium, Systematic Chaos and Black Clouds & Silver Linings were all written and recorded simultaneously in the recording studio.

Because of this process, there were no proper “demos” of these songs as we moved into the recording studio to begin tracking once the music was done. So the only “demos” that exist are these live, instrumental rehearsal recordings that we would lay down after completing writing the music of each song. The lyrics and vocals all came much later in the process once we were already tracking in the recording studio. (In fact, we recorded most of the album and then took a break to do a summer tour with Queensrÿche before returning with lyrics to begin the vocal tracking after the tour.)

I debated on putting these recordings in the sequence of the final album, but then decided instead to follow the layout of the previous Ytsejam Records demo CDs and present them chronologically in the order they were written. The only exception here is that I took creative license and moved Vacant to directly precede Stream Of Consciousness on this CD (they need to be together!), even though Vacant was song actually #5 to be written of the 7... otherwise the songs are in order of which they were written...