Exist

Exist is the final song on The Stage. Exist is the bands longest song to date, clocking in at 15 minutes and 41 seconds in length. The track features a special appearance by Neil deGrasse Tyson, with a special spoken-word part that he wrote specifically for the album.

Concept and meaning
The song itself is meant to be a musical interpretation of the Big Bang. M. Shadows said "The song came from the idea of wanting to replicate the Big Bang in a heavy-metal sort of way, like, 'OK, this is what it would have sounded like when this happened.' It's like a huge classical piece. We love Gustav Holst's The Planets, but no one's really hit the Big Bang, so we did it. I wanted it to be all instrumental, and then Brian was like, 'Well, I think there should be some vocals on it.' So we ended up with a compromise where it's like, 'OK, when the vocals come in, that's Earth – that's the first time that life starts after the cooling-down period of the Big Bang."

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 everyone 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?

I'm sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone Far beyond the dreams of everyone There's 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?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson, spoken:] 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. Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self murdering bomb, vanished airplane, Every fictionalized dictator, biased partisan and wayward son Part 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, comets, 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 — in our hearts, our minds, in our out-sized atlases? The universe is even bigger. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world's beaches. More stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed. More stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. The day we cease exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuance of our species. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations Would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices, And would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment — Until the rise of a visionary new culture once again embraces the cosmic perspective; A perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above, nor below, but within.