100 Sleeves Challenge: Scenes from a Memory

• Sleeve 011/100: Metropolis, pt 2: Scenes From a Memory (1999)
• Studio Album by Dream Theater
• Label: Elektra Records
• Genre: Progressive Metal, Progressive Rock
• Original Cover Desing by Dave McKean

Sleeve #11 for my project #100albumsleeves🔥.

I started listening to Dream Theater in my early teens (13-14) during a music exploration phase, probably influenced by my younger brother. I remember loving them immediately.

My friends used to comment on how they couldn’t stand how long DT songs are. For me, that’s my favorite part. DT was the first progressive metal band I knew, so the long songs were something new to me and in a good way fascinating.

Dream Theater accompanied me during hard times in my late teens. Back then I would lie in my bed and just listen to them, whole albums at a time in chronological order. My experience with their music is deeply immersive, kind of being floating in a bubble and disconnecting from the outer world.

I have many favorite albums by Dream Theater, like “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” and “Train of Thought“, but I chose “Metropolis pt.2: Scenes From a Memory” because “The spirit carries on“, one of my favorite songs, is in there. I also love the interesting story told in the album:

Nicholas is hunted by weird dreams so he goes to past life regression therapy. Through hypnosis, he discovers he is the reincarnation of a woman, Victoria, who was murdered by her lover, Julian.

Nicholas notices how the official story of the murder doesn’t add up to his visions. He begins to believe that Victoria is haunting him to reveal the truth about her murder and he’s now on a quest to uncover the truth so he can go on with his life in peace.

In the end, he discovers the real murderer was Edward, Victoria’s ex-boyfriend, and Julian’s brother. Nicholas goes home feeling “finally free”, but he is followed by his hypnotherapist, who in a turn of events, is Edward’s reincarnation, and has come to kill Nicholas to complete the cycle yet again 🙃.

Album Cover Redesign by franzmori. This is fan art, no copyright infringement intended.

My cover is inspired more by how the music makes me feel than the story. There’s a moment in the song “Scene Four: Beyond This Life” where the music goes from left to right and right to left, and I pictured waves/lines going through my ears. When I tried to put that on paper the inside of a torus was the most similar to what I experienced.

I also recalled the feeling of being inside a bubble and my first approximations to the cover were in rainbow colors. In the end, I settled for a monochromatic image as I feel it fits the atmosphere of the album better.

Would you like your own Album Cover design?
I’m available for commissions!

Listen to the art! I’ll be adding a new album each week to this Spotify playlist HERE. 
To know more about my personal project and see the rest of the cover designs in this series, go HERE.