Songfacts®:

• Some people lie their way to riches with no regard for the people they hurt along the way. This song is about one such person.
  
  "My circle of friends was friends with this guy, and he got caught in a very elaborate scheme of stealing things," Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci, who wrote the lyric, said in a Songfacts interview. "That's something that we found out about this person that we didn't know was happening under all of our noses. It was definitely a song about deception."
• This is the first song on the first Dream Theater album, When Dream and Day Unite. The band formed at Berklee College of Music in 1985 after John Petrucci and drummer Mike Portnoy bonded over their love of Rush. The following year, they dropped out of school and started performing under the name Majesty with bass player John Myung and keyboard player Kevin Moore. Charlie Dominici joined as lead singer in 1987. They signed with the label Mechanic Records the following year and released When Dream and Day Unite in March 1989, changing their name to Dream Theater because a Las Vegas band was using the name Majesty. The album got little support from the label and went nowhere, but when they swapped out Dominici for new lead singer James LaBrie and jumped to Atco Records, they got the support they needed and established themselves as leaders of the progressive metal genre.
  
  The band feels their debut album was recorded poorly, but "A Fortune In Lies" has held up better than the other tracks and is one they sometimes played live decades on.