Forsaken is probably my favorite song about a vampire luring people into situations in which they get their blood sucked. Or at least, it has my favorite guitar solo.

In guitarist/lyricist John Petrucci's own words:

It's about somebody who gets visited at night by a vampiress, and gets taken away and shown all these wonderful things but doesn't realize the whole time that he's getting his blood sucked. And then she ends up taking him in the end. Nice light topic.

Recording

With apologies to Jordan Rudess and John Myung; I just made up a bass and keyboard part. But they're always so criminally low in the studio mix you can't really hear them anyway, so who knows what they're actually playing.

Actually, I'll just go ahead and apologize to Mike Portnoy, John Petrucci, and James LaBrie as well.

It ends with a 6-string sweep starting on the 19th fret. I don't really understand why anyone would want to write a solo with something like that in it.

Recorded in Ardour and Hydrogen was used to program the drum track.