Songfacts®:

• Guitarist John Petrucci explained the meaning of this ballad to Ultimate-Guitar.com: "To me with producing," he said, "it's being able to step back and really see what you're trying to do from the beginning. Then to put all the pieces in place so that you follow that road to where when you're done you can say, 'OK, this is what I expected it to be. I did all the things that made it happen.' That's really, really important to me to keep that focus and to have a really good grasp of the bigger picture. And that's kind of like what that song is actually about."
• The song started out as a part from "The Enemy Inside." Keyboardist Jordan Rudess told MusicRadar: "That was a good move, I have to say. Dream Theater have no shortage of ideas – we just throw so many things out there. It's always like picking up a handful of colors and throwing them at the wall. You can't stop the inspirations when they come, but that doesn't mean everything is always appropriate for that place and time."
  
  "In looking at the ideas," Rudess continued, "we had to say, 'OK, this part is great, but maybe it's another kind of thing.' First of all, we didn't want to make our songs too long – well, we do have the 22 minute one in there [laughs]. But we did want to be to the point. So, finally, we took part of 'The Enemy Inside' and it started to become 'The Bigger Picture.'"
• The song is one of several tracks on the Dream Theater album that sports acoustic guitar. Petrucci told Ultimate Guitar: "I use acoustic in my approach is certainly not as abundant as my electric playing. I mostly play electric. I use acoustic guitars kind of like a flavor and it's a spice in my spice rack. I use it as an orchestrational tool in the same way a keyboard player would switch to a piano to have a more personal, organic sound. I'll do that. I use the acoustic to support electric clean sounds. Nine times out of ten I have an acoustic doubling the clean sounds just to give it some thickness and percussive quality behind it. And every so often I just do acoustic only to carry a song."