My favorite artist- using the term in a looser sense than just visual artist, -would probably be Dream Theater, a Progressive Metal band with a penchant for long songs. Though founded well before I was born, they are still active to this day, touring, and even releasing an album as recently as last year.
You may not have heard of Dream Theater... perhaps you have if you're a musician, though. Y'see, their only true mainstream hit, 'Pull Me Under', was from their second album entitled 'Images and Words'- but Dream Theater is fairly widely known in the music community for the musical prowess of its members. Odd time signatures, shifting through those and with blazing speed to boot; hard to play, but they make it good to listen to.
Dream Theater's music ranges from the melodic to the heavy, as pointed out by their own 'Greatest Hit (...and 21 Other Pretty Cool Songs)' compilation album that I didn't know existed until doing research for this blog post. Melodic songs like 'Space-Dye Vest' feature keyboard melodies made to sound like piano, or in 'The Silent Man', acoustic guitar strumming. I like the former, myself... not so much the latter. Heavier songs are more prevalent on their more recent albums, especially the very metal 'Train of Thought'. (cover art)
My favorite
The song's lyrics are coherent and free of metal screams, sort of telling a story; they also have an alcoholism metaphor to them, or so I'm told by related Wikipedia articles, something I'll really just ignore. But tying into this, 'The Mirror' is repeatedly referenced by later songs in an album-spanning suite of related songs. Those songs' position in the suite is even marked in the album notes, not that there's ever any explicit mention of a suite existing!
As this post is making clear to me, I'm not very serious about my music. I don't even focus on a single artist, these days, instead listening to Pandora Internet Radio, sometimes looking up a song I hear on radio or at dance class on YouTube, or ripping to the computer a new CD of my dad's he's been playing in the car that I like. The last of those is how I ended up listening to Dream Theater in the first place, though I'm unsure if 'Awake' (cover art) was a new CD of Dad's then or if I ripped it to the computer.
In any case, good
