"The Spirit Carries On" by Solstice Coil Played for 5,000 Dream Theater fans during concert

When writing my last post two weeks ago, I didn’t even dare to dream that something like this would happen. True. I knew that our Dream Theater parody had potential; when you do something that’s really good, you can always feel it. However, we’ve had our share of “viral schemes” and not all of them turned out quite as well as we had hoped, so there is always the fear of that happening again. After a while you start feeling like you’re doomed to try and take over the world every night for all of eternity.

But unlike Pinky and the Brain, this plan actually worked. Initially, we got quite a few comments, almost all of them positive, which was particularly surprising to me because I was expecting at least some antagonism from hardcore Dream Theater fans. In a couple of days we managed to reach some 3,000 views, by posting the video on our Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as various music discussion boards and Dream Theater forums.

This was quite an achievement, but then something happened that we didn’t expect, or at least, we didn’t expect it to happen so soon: Jordan Rudess posted a comment on our YouTube page. Shortly after, John Petrucci posted a link to our video on both his official Facebook and Twitter accounts.

From there on, the parody really picked up the pace. After only two weeks on YouTube, we’ve managed to reach over 20,000 views and over 100 comments. People were going crazy over the video, with over 5,000 shares on Facebook and who knows what else. Goldmine Magazine even wrote a very favorable review about the parody.

Sounds pretty awesome, right? But wait, there’s more.

A few days ago I received a text from our good friend Eyal Amir from Project RNL, who’s actually worked with Jordan Rudess in the past months on several videoSongs (and if you haven’t seen them yet, you should.) The message said that Jordan wanted to show our parody on Dream Theater’s concert in Israel.

So on the day of the concert, we headed out to Israel Trade Fairs & Convention Center in Tel Aviv, because naturally we wanted to see this happen for ourselves. We went in to meet the band before the concert and present them with gifts: copies of Natural Causes, of course, and a framed triangle with a special engraving:



Meeting Dream Theater, which has been a major influence on us since the day Solstice Coil was formed, was a real treat. Jordan was very gracious and reminded us that the parody was going to be shown, which was very nice of him since I still didn’t believe it was actually going to happen. John Petrucci was kind enough to say how funny we are, and even John Myung talked to us – I swear!

I particularly appreciated Mike Mangini’s reaction, because we were a little concerned that he might take our parody of him personally – but he was totally cool with it. He jokingly said, “Next time don’t swear so much” stating that he couldn’t show it to his kids because of our frequent use of the “F-Bomb”. He further demonstrated his sense of humor when he retired to the dressing room and shouted out “okay I’m gonna go cry now!”

John Petrucci wanted to take another photograph with us and the framed triangle, so naturally we did:



Afterwards, Jordan wanted another photograph as well, but JP had already run off with the triangle! So we took one without it instead:



The Moment of Truth
After the warm-up by Israeli Daniel J’s band Against the Wall, all the lights in the hall lid up, and to me it kinda felt like they’re telling everyone that the show was over and that we had to leave and the whole thing was basically off. But that wasn’t really the case.

Meanwhile the stage was rearranged and Mangini’s innovative drum set was positioned at the center of the stage. And then, as you’re about to see, all ten minutes of the parody were shown on a giant screen to some 5,000 Israel DT fans:

Watch Video http://youtu.be/Vj1kN8rZjHY

Needless to say, we feel rather fortunate to be in a spot at our lives and our careers… well you know the rest.

Without a shred of cynicism, this truly has been a dream come true. So once again we’d like to thank the band for being such good sports and for helping out a fellow prog band.