Songfacts®:

• This 23-minute epic is in the vein of progressive rock classics like "Supper's Ready" by Genesis and "2112" by Rush. It's broken up into seven movements:
  
  I. The Crimson Sunrise
  II. Innocence
  III. Carpe Diem
  IV. The Darkest of Winters
  V. Another World
  VI. The Inevitable Summer
  VII. The Crimson Sunset
  
  The lyrics were written by Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, and find him coming to terms with the death of his mother, who was killed in a November 1984 plane crash:
  
  I'll always remember
  The chill of November
  The news of the fall
  
  "I was in school the day my mom died," he explained on his website. "The teacher was giving a lesson on how you should appreciate life, and gave us a whole thing about Carpe Diem and then I went home and gave my mom a big kiss and a hug goodbye, and then she ended up getting killed that night."
• Dream Theater recorded "A Change Of Seasons" for their second album, Images And Words, released in 1992, but in age of vinyl, cassette and CD, a 23-minute song would take up half the album. They wanted to make Images And Words a double album to include the song, but their label, Atco, nixed the idea.
  
  In 1995, they recorded the song again with the same producer, David Prater, and released it on an EP called A Change Of Seasons, which was filled out with a collection of live cover songs.
• This section of the lyrics comes from the poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick (1591-1674):
  
  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
  Old Time is still a-flying
  And this same flower that smiles to-day
  To-morrow will be dying >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Lucius - Gaston, IN
• This was the first Dream Theater recording with Derek Sherinian, who replaced Kevin Moore on keyboards in 1994.
• The "Carpe Diem" section includes samples from the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, and from the 1983 film Table For Five. According to Mike Portnoy, he thought the Dead Poets Society lines worked well in the song, but was more inspired by another Robin Williams movie, The World According to Garp (1982), which he describes as "dealing with the cycles of life."
• Among the interesting bits of percussion is a vibraslap, an instrument that produces a chattering sound when it's struck. It was invented in 1967 to approximate the sound of a jawbone, an instrument made from the dried jawbone of animals like horses and donkeys. The vibration from striking the top would make the teeth rattle in the loose sockets. The modern version uses a wooden ball connected to a box of metal teeth.
  
  The first hit to prominently feature the vibraslap was "Green Tambourine" by The Lemon Pipers.