Heck yeah! Great song, and some of my favorite lyrics. I play RPGs solo, and one of the ways to enhance or prompt your imrov story-telling is to keep an "anchor" list - a list of themes or lore or anything else you want to make sure gets incorporated somehow at some point. The first item in my anchor list is "All The Fools Sailed Away".

I wasn't going to post the following, because not all of the metal trivialities of my life require sharing, but batflunkie's post must be sign. My kid and I had another another Stargazer appreciation session today. He made a point to follow the story, and was really enamored with it. So that's the way forward for me to sneak more metal appreciation into his life - whenever he's a captive audience, I need to play metal with the kind of story I know would appeal to him. Come to think of it, that must be why he tolerates Iron Maiden the most.

The fact that my kid is not a metalhead is the final nail in the coffin of Lamarckian Evolution.

Great discussions, all. Regarding the intersection of metal and prog, how do you guys like Opeth?

I saw them live before Megadeth one day (it was Gigantour...what a hell of a lineup... Arch Enemy, Opeth, Lamb of God, Megadeth). It was before I was into the really heavy stuff, so I didn't quite appreciate it. I've since revisited but not thoroughly. I think I would have better luck today.

But they always had a mix of the metal with the progressive cleaner elements, and have since gone full prog and aren't even metal anymore.

Similar but kind of opposite, is Porcupine Tree. They are by no means a metal band and are far more a proggy thing, but they have occasional songs where they are just crushingly heavy... and I wish they had more like that.

On a similar note, I am kind of looking for, and failing to find, a band that sounds like Muse but who goes all-in on being metal instead of just occasionally flirting with it.

NWOBHM is a great entree, but it really comes to live when you find the right sides and seasonings. Or something.

Megadeth rules.

The bass player in my old band was a huge fan of both Opeth and Porcupine Tree and was always sending their stuff my way. While I appreciate the musicianship, I really don't have the attention span for it, I basically need a steady diet of heavy riffs. I do admire Steven Wilson though, he's a real "musician's musician". There's some stuff he's done with Guthrie Govan I've liked a little better (Govan is technically one of the most outstanding guitar players I've ever heard, and I've heard them all).

Speaking of Gigantour, the 2005 tour had a great lineup as well (it was released as a DVD), with Nevermore and Symphony X on the ticket. Dream Theater as well and they stuck more with their heavy stuff. Also an obscure little crazy group called Bobaflex (who actually got added because Mustaine's kid liked them), they are pretty funny and kind of punkish.

They do indeed, last night on the jam list was Skull Beneath the Skin, Mechanix, Wake Up Dead, Devil's Island, all a blast to play

I don't remember anybody actually using the abbreviation "NWOBHM" back in the day, I'd heard "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" at times in reference to those bands, but mostly when I was growing up we just called stuff metal or hard rock and not much in the way of sub-genres. Thrash a bit of an exception, that was named pretty early. And "hair metal" of course is a much more modern term (though if we thought a glam hard rock band was more image than talent, we'd throw the "poseur" label on them in a heartbeat).

Of course, for those who remember, there was the old famous "Is that Freedom Rock man?" ad...

Yeah, I admit heavy music wasn't on my radar until the mid-late 90s, but what I've gotten from talking to folks who were around back in the day and reading interviews with the bands themselves, it seems the extreme and minute hyper-classification of everything is a relatively recent thing. One more thing we can thank the internet for.

There was an interview with one of the guys from Korn asking them about it or something similar, and he said "We just called it all metal" so even the bands themselves being cataloged and sorted didn't seem fussed about it.

I can see the benefit of having access to this level of detail if you are deep in the weeds hunting for similar bands, but in terms of general conversation, I think the level of pedantry is at least as bad as any other geek subculture I'm either in or adjacent to.