In a surprise move, Avenged Sevenfold released their seventh album The Stage with no prior announcement to a release date earlier this week (the 27th). The band had been building up to the a surprise announcement, but most fans just thought it would be a release date and announcing of the album's title. In The Stage, much to many fans' delight it turns out the band worked with famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson for a song titled Exist.
Many of the songs on The Stage discuss outer space and artificial intelligence, so they wanted to give more impact by using audio from Carl Sagan's The Pale Blue Dot. Unfortunately Sagan's estate wasn't having it, so instead A7X reached out to Tyson. In an interview with Rolling Stone, singer M. Shadows discusses the experience, saying:
“We explained to him that we wanted to educate our fans and we wanted to a voice of science in another art form, and he was like, ‘Yep – if it’s for education, let’s do it!’ He asked us to read through a bunch of essays that he’d used at the Hayden Planetarium, and find any portions that we wanted him to take and expand on. We found some stuff we liked, and went back and forth on the phone with him about it to the point where we were all happy with it, and then he laid it down for us.”
I've listened to Exist myself. It's one doozie of a tune even with out Tyson's audio part. The fact that they would include something as knowledgeable and profound as they did in their music makes me have a whole new level of respect for them as musicians and people. I never took them to be the type that were into science and education, but I was delightfully proven wrong. It may be a 15.5 minute tune, but it's very much worth listening to.
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