Queensryche is back with a new concept album on March 31^st. This time, instead of dissecting the seedy underbelly of the drug world, the band tell the tales of brave men who sacrificed themselves and fought for our country. The brainchild behind the new album, titled American Soldier, was vocalist Geoff Tate’s father’s personal stories that he began sharing for the first time in his life. Geoff was inspired to seek out other soldiers to learn what they had in common with his father’s tales. He was surprised to see that it did not matter what war the soldier fought in, their stories were the same. Tate interviewed soldier after soldier and played the interviews for his band. Soon, they began writing music and another Queensryche epic was underway.

In this interview, Geoff talks about the questions and answers that were raised during his research and how it affected him, both personally and artistically. We also look back at key moments in Queensryche’s career, including both Operation Mindcrime albums and how losing Chris DeGarmo threw the band for a loop.

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Geoff: I have been prodding him all my life to talk about it but he was never interested in going down that path. I attribute his recent opening up about it to his being a certain age now—he is in his mid 70's. He is in that part of life where he is reviewing everything.

What I found out from other solders, in doing my research, is that it is typical for guys at that age to start talking about this stuff. I was glad that I was there when he did and I was glad that I had my camera with me. I filmed the conversation we were having and I was playing it for my wife and kids when I got home. My wife was the one who suggested that I write a song about my dad. It got me to thinking about the soldier’s story. That, coupled with a couple of other things, sent me in that direction. For us, that is pretty typical for an album. You lean in a certain direction and then start writing songs about it.

Geoff: We like to do that kind of thing. We have this wonderful medium called albums. It really is challenging. It is quite satisfying to write an album where all the songs link together or are focused on the same topic. I like that better than a collection of songs that are disjointed. To be honest, I think we enjoy making concept albums more than just putting together a bunch of songs and making an album.

Geoff: It is sort of like working out a crossword puzzle. With a crossword puzzle you have all these different words that have to link together in some respect. With an album, you have these similarities and you have to focus to be able to put it together in a meaningful way.

Geoff: The whole thing kind of evolved. It started with the song about my dad, "The Voice." It really made me question, "What is the soldier’s story?" I started noticing bumper stickers on cars in traffic that said, "I support the troops." I started thinking, "What does that mean? Of course, I support the troops. Why even put that on a bumper sticker?" I started realizing that people attach all sort of politics to war. Is that different than supporting the troops? I had conversations like this in my head and I became kind of curious.

I spend a lot of time in airports. One day I was sitting in Starbucks in an airport and a couple soldiers come in with their backpacks. I strike up a conversation. I start asking questions and then next thing you know, I am pulling out my Dictaphone and recording the conversation. I listened to it back on the airplane. I don’t really talk to soldiers, normally, in regard to what they do and how they feel about things. Now, I was curious. I started hunting down other soldiers and that led to them giving me phone numbers and putting me in touch with other people they thought I would be interested in talking to.

A couple of years went by and I had all this film and all these interviews. I found out there was a lot of commonality in these stories, which was surprising to me. I focused on what the commonalities were and I wrote an outline based upon those commonalities—that is like the crossword puzzle we talked about. I cataloged all of my interviews and I played them back to the band. We would watch the interviews or listen back to the audio and it really gave them a lot of perspective on the emotional side of what these guys are talking about. That, in turn, translates into the writing of the music. It was really beneficial to have the interviews and incorporating them into the songs really gave the album more of an emotional impact.

Geoff: One of the things I hope most for this record is that it gives a human side to a horrific event. War is not something that we should take lightly. One thing I found out, that was surprising to me, was that most of the soldiers I talked to didn’t support war, in concept. They wished they had not been there or they wished they had not had to go. They all thought there were other ways of dealing with things. They all felt that war should be a last resort. It really made me think. A lot of us get really charged up about things and we say, "We need to go kick their ass" but we don’t really think about the consequences of doing that. We are talking about affecting thousands and thousands of people’s lives. You affect the people in the act but you also affect all of their families and friends as well, and all of the people on the other side of the fence. It is a huge, huge endeavor. A lot of times, we take it pretty lightly and look at it like a sporting event. I don’t feel that way anymore, especially after talking with the people I have talked to. It is pretty serious stuff.

Geoff: I hope so. I hope that comes across. It was an emotional album to make. I found myself really engaged with it in a really strange way. Usually, when I make an album, it is about me and my point of view or my impressions about things. This was the first album that I have ever made that was about other people and their stories. It was about their lives and it was their words. I was a biographer who was documenting what they had to say.

The lyrical style was very different for me. I write a lot of questions in the lyrics I write. I use compound sentences and there are many commas. If you look at the lyrics on this album, they are pretty much all statements. I enjoyed that. Even though it wasn’t about me, I was really affected by it, emotionally. I have been emotional about albums that I have done in the past because they were my emotions, but this was the first time that I had really felt for somebody else.

Geoff: He is very proud of it and he likes it a lot. He is not a real serious guy. He is lighthearted. He told me, "You have been waiting all of your life to hear my war stories and you only used nineteen seconds of it." We laughed about that. It is a pretty powerful nineteen seconds.

Geoff: Maybe it is our age.

Geoff: I get reminded of that all the time. I was backstage recently and there were a group of young kids waiting to meet the band. I am shaking hands with them and I say, "So, what brings you out to a Queensryche show?" One of them, who had pimples on his face, with long hair goes, "You guys are legends and we wanted to see you before you’re dead."

Geoff: I didn’t have anything to say right off. I thought to myself that you should see artists that you appreciate and music that you love. There are bands that I wish I would have seen and then there are bands that I have seen who really left an impression on me. You see a lot of these old guys who are still playing and you watch their show and you are amazed. They do it effortlessly. They have mastered their skill. You don’t have that mastery when you are a young guy; you are just learning how to do it all and you’re wearing your influences on your sleeve. When you watch these old guys play you think, "I have got so much farther to go."

Geoff: You try to keep challenging yourself and you keep trying to find ways to keep presenting yourself. I am sure you are hip to the state of the record industry; it is nothing anymore. I applaud them for doing something like that; it is a class move. I will tell you what will happen, from experience, there will be people that are disappointed that they are doing that. They are going to go, "I have never seen Priest and they only played one album." You can’t please everybody.

Geoff: We have fine tuned out touring machine to a point where we can economically bring an entertaining show on the road. On this tour, we are playing three of our albums in their totality. We are playing Rage for Order, American Soldier and Empire. We will be playing the entirety of those records over two nights. What you don’t see on night one, you will see on night two. We are hoping that this will satisfy our fans. We want to present the new material but we know our fans want to see the older material as well. We are focusing on a couple of albums that are fans favorites.

Geoff: We did a website poll of our fans and we asked them what they would like to see us do. We really want to please our fan base so we asked them what they wanted. Rage for Order was one of the strongest responses that we got. The second highest response was Empire. It has been a lot of fun going back and revisiting songs off of those two albums. Some of the songs, we have not played since they came out. Rage came out in 1986.

Geoff: It is funny, but when I write something, it stays with me. I just close my eyes and it comes out from someplace—some chest that is locked away in my brain. There are some melody and phrasing things that you think, "How did I do that?" So, you go back and listen to the record and go, "Oh, that is how I did that. I would not have done it that way now."

Geoff: I agree. That was the first album where we started getting away from the obvious influences and pooling some of our more obscure influences in. It was our first foray into writing from a theme based concept. We really were trying to paint an audio picture of what we were talking about in the lyrics. It was a very successful endeavor from our point. As a band, we always use that as a gauge. We say, "Was it as interesting as Rage."

Geoff: I was contracted to play a part in a film called House of Eternity. Because of the world financing situation, the financing for that particular film fell through. It is still on the table. The script and a lot of the actors are contracted but, as they say in the film industry, it is waiting. Previous to that, there was a huge actor strike that put a hold on the thing as well. They went to European financing and they got the green light and were going to start filming it last summer and then it fell through. It has been plagued by financing, which is a problem in Hollywood with every film. Since then, I have been contracted to do three other things in films. I am doing music in one and I am doing acting in two of the other ones. Sometime this year, I suppose one of those things, or maybe all of them, will come through.

Geoff: I was part of that. It is called Programming the Nation. It was not me doing that, I had a part in it where I was interviewed about my thoughts on subliminal messaging. I think that is coming out soon.

Geoff: It is slightly true. I think there is always a bit of truth to rumor. What the deal was is that Kelly Gray, who is a long time friend of mine, and I had a band together called Myth. We were writing songs. We had a full album together but we could never get it off the ground. I had played in a covers band with the guys in Queensryche, we were called The Mob. I had said to them, "I really like you guys. This has been really fun but I really want to devote myself to writing. I am going to split off and devote myself to the Myth project." A year went by and we couldn’t get a record deal. The Queensryche guys came back to me and told me that over the corse of the year, they had been writing songs and they wanted me to listen to them. I listened to them and I really liked them. They asked me to sing on the album and they told me that they had some connections and they thought that we could get a record deal. I agreed to sing on the album with the condition that we write a song together. We wrote "The Lady Wore Black." We changed the name of he band and we got a record deal.

Geoff: I knew the Queensryche guys almost as good as I knew the guys in Myth. It was just a different bunch of guys. Queensryche were really dedicated to the craft and were really disciplined. Myth was not as disciplined. I enjoyed the fact that everyone always showed up on time and never missed a gig. They were very serious about it and it was a nice change for me. We all grew to appreciated each other’s strengths. We each had huge record collections with all kinds of different music and that really was a big plus.

Geoff: It was a series of events that lead to that record. After the Rage to Order tour, I had stayed in Montreal, Canada and moved in with some friends. I felt that I needed a change of scenery and a change of pace. The people I moved in with were French Canadians. I really got into their whole theme. The bars we would frequent, and the people we associated with, were part of this organization that was responsible for horrible things like car bombings and other acts of terrorism. They were trying to separate the Province of Quebec from Canada. Looking back, it was a terrible situation to be involved with. I wasn’t part of it in the sense that I was actively involved in it, but I knew these people. Talking with them and hearing their points of view—they are very political and opinionated. It left an impression on me. It was the main event that inspired a good portion of the record. I also wrote about people I knew who were pretty heavy drug users and derelicts. They actually became the models for a lot of the characters. All of Operation Mindcrime is based on certain amounts of fact. There were some real lunatics involved in that organization; they were real nut balls.

Geoff: It is a different approach. American Soldier is based on actual people and interviews, where Mindcrime is creating characters from people you come across and know. You use them as a basis and then add quite a bit of imagination to the story.

Geoff: No, we had actually began working on it years earlier. The majority of it was mapped out and developed. It was really just putting the finishing touches on it and recording the music.

Geoff: I can understand that. There has not really been a lot of great sequels. I understand that perspective of apprehension. You have so many years of living with Mindcrime. Music is so subjective. People hear the actual music differently. Some people can hear the subtleties between the musical instruments and other people just hear a wall of sound. When you grab onto an album, it becomes part of your life. You play it in the car when you travel to places and it really gets in your head. People lived with Mindcrime for eighteen years. They had their own mythology built up around it. For some people, coming out with Mindcrime II, would make them apprehensive because the first one was so special to them. We were very aware of that and tried to approach it in the same way we approached the first one, which was really focusing the sound scape around the story.

Geoff: [Laughing]

Geoff: Not at all. If you take that song apart and listen to it from a musical standpoint, there really isn’t any Floyd in it. What you’re hearing is the orchestration for the arrangement. It was written by Michael Kamen, who had worked with Floyd on many albums. He also worked with us as far back as The Warning. If there is any similarity between them, then that is what it is. Usually, people compare it to "Comfortably Numb." The song is in a different key, the chord arrangements are completely different and there are no melodies that are similar, except at the chorus of each song. There are a couple of similarities but not as many as people think.

Geoff: I would think so. We all have records by Pink Floyd. Wish You Were Here is one of my all time favorite albums.

Geoff: It turned out nice.

Geoff: We had a fun time doing that. The whole reason we did that was to motivate us to finish American Soldier. We had been doing a lot of touring and nobody wanted to go into the studio and work on our time off. As a way of snapping us out of our lull, the record company came to us and said, "Why don’t you do a covers album? It will be fun to do and you can knock it out really quickly." Once we got done with that record, we just launched into finishing American Soldier. Sometimes you need a kick in the pants. It was a fun album to do because we all got to pick our favorite songs and bring them in. There wasn’t any pressure because you already had a bunch of great songs to work with.

Geoff: In that period of time, what you are hearing is a band that was reorganizing and trying to find themselves. Chris’s departure was a huge blow to us. He was a guy who did everything. He was a real leader personality and he was a strong collaborator. He could take everybody’s half baked ideas and really make them into something. He also handled all of the business for the band. Chris was really the motivation for everybody. When he left, we were basically like an automobile without an engine. We had the basic structure but we didn’t have the power plant to make us move. We had to figure out how we were going to do this. It was a real growth period. The stuff we did with Chris was great. We all understand and realize that. We miss him from that standpoint and we are devastated by his leaving.

I can understand people seeing the material that way. For example, if you listen to The Tribe album, which was a completely confusing project to be a part of— you think you were confused.... Michael would record his guitar parts, as usual, and there was no one to put the other part on there. The guitar part would be in mono. There would be guitar on only one side of the stereo spectrum because Michael would never think about recording the other part because Chris did that. Nobody was watching that because we were all busy trying to figure out what else we had to do. Things got missed and overlooked. I don’t even think there are any guitar solos on that record.

Geoff: [Laughing] Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Geoff: It was very cool. The moment went by so fast I didn’t really appreciate it. I can comment about when he came into the studio to record his part for the album. That was really special. I really enjoyed working with him. He was so easy to work with and he was very creative. I wrote that song and had mapped out all the parts and sent him my version of it. When he came into the studio, he was very well prepared and he had mastered the parts that I had given him and created some other parts that we did because we liked what he had come up with so much. I remember that I was producing that session and Jason Slater was engineering it. When Ronnie went out to get on the microphone, he let loose with that roar like only Ronnie can do, I looked over at Jason and he said, "Oh my god, that is Dio behind the microphone." He said, "I am trying to be professional but I am freaking out." Ronnie gave us take after take and it was difficult to choose which one to use because they were all so good.

Geoff: It is nice to be appreciated for what you do. I am in wonderful company with that bunch. I know all of those guys and they are wonderful singers and they are all still doing it.

Geoff: [Laughter] You know, I get asked that in every interview. The other guys get asked that as well. I will tell you what the story was. Years ago, Iron Maiden, Queensryche and Halford’s solo band were all touring together. We had a day off and we all went out for an Italian dinner. We were all sitting at this big round table and it was really noisy and everyone was drunk and eating pasta and telling road stories. It was really a fun night. I was sitting next to Rod Smallwood, who is Maiden’s manager. In his drunken stupor he asked the waiter, "What is this music we are listening to here?" The waiter says, "This is the famous Three Tenors, the opera singers." Rod stands up with his wine glass in his hand, and kind of falls to one side and says, "I think we should make a record with Geoff, Bruce and Rob and call it The Three Tremors." We all laughed and toasted and said, "That is really funny, Rod." It was just dinner conversation and that is as far as it went. The next day it started showing up in the press and ten years later I am still answering the question.

Geoff: [Laughing]

Geoff: I have not done enough interviews with enough people to come up with a good answer to that question. I guess there is a fun side to me but I don’t know what that would be.

www.queensryche.com
www.geofftate.com
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