Songfacts®:

• The demo for this morose ballad about a woman who dies during childbirth was penned by drummer Scott Rockenfield. Vocalist Todd La Torre recalled to Music Enthusiast Magazine: "When I got the song with no vocal melody or lyrics, it was already titled 'A World Without.' You know, a lot of times an artist will just save a file with a name or some sort of reference when they come up with an idea, and I just liked the title. So I literally wrote the lyrics and the melody around the title, in what I think was like thirty minutes. I know it was less than an hour. It was quite late, late at night or early in the morning, and I got up, opened up my laptop, I played it and started typing as I was feeling the melody."
  
  "There's a lot of metaphorical things," La Torre added, "like the wife in the second verse. The guy is smoking a cigarette, and the wife becomes the cigarette, and she's the smoke he's breathing in. So, she's closer to him in this way then she ever could be in the flesh."
  
  "So, there's a lot of those little lines," he concluded, "like 'The tickle in my throat, your way of reaching out'. It's kind of an out-there idea, but it's something that has always fascinated me, what happens to us when we pass away. And so that touches on, you know, the idea of reincarnation and what can happen."
• The orchestration was done by Rockenfield, who has been composing music for TV commercials, video and film scores since the early 1990s. In 2010 he composed and recorded drum tracks for the Activision video game Call of Duty: Black Ops.
• The song features backing vocals from Pamela Moore, who was the voice of Sister Mary on Queensrÿche's concept albums Operation: Mindcrime and Operation: Mindcrime II. Moore has performed live with Queensrÿche on several occasions.
• Rockenfield shed some light on how his writing collaboration with Todd La Torre on this song worked, during an interview with Oregon Music News: "I wrote all the music for that song," he explained. "I threw it out there to everybody via e-mail when I first composed it in my home. A couple of hours later, I received a call from Todd, the guy was practically in tears. He was at home in Florida. He said, 'The song is done, check your email.' I checked my e-mail — within two hours, he had written the lyrics and recorded the vocals for the entire song. That's basically what you hear on that tune."