Exist is the eleventh and final song on Avenged Sevenfold's 2016 album, The Stage. It is Avenged Sevenfold's longest song to date, at 15 minutes and 41 seconds. It has a cameo monologue from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and a 7 minute and 30 seconds instrumental at the beginning.
Lyrics[]
Our truth is painted across the sky
In our reflection we learn to fly
No hand to hold us
No one to save us from tomorrow
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of eeryone
No light to follow, a shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens, I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?
Think for a moment of all the lives
Stripped of their essence before their time
We stand to conquer
But is there nothing left tomorrow?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of eeryone
No light to follow, a shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens, I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?
We have one collective hope: the Earth. And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound. Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war; people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's concept of God. Do we admit that our thoughts & behaviors spring from the belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son, are part of the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comet,s and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever-expanding, with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time. However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outside atmosphere, the universe is even bigger. Ther are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the worlds' beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words & sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. The day we cease ethe exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people & nations would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices, and we would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment. Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective; a perspective in which wee are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within.
Meaning[]
Video[]
Avenged Sevenfold - Exist Music Video