A Pleasant Shade of Gray A Pleasant Shade of Gray A Pleasant Shade of Gray is a concept album by the progressive metal group Fates Warning, released in 1997. It contains one song divided into twelve parts and is noted for its darker mood and more progressive style. "A Pleasant Shade Of Gray" is a single song that is divided into twelve tracks. The album is notable for its darker mood and mixture of progressive rock and metal with hints of industrial, classical, and psychedelia. Jim Matheos wrote the album following Fates Warning's 1994 tour in support of "Inside Out", with Matheos mailing tapes to
Pale Fire see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, stating in an interview in 1962 (the novel's year of publication) that "Pale Fire" "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman." The novel's intricate structure of teasing cross-references leads readers to this "plum". The Index, supposedly