QUEENSRŸCHE's TATE: This Is First Time 'Mindcrime' Has Been Performed Without Backing Tapes

In a brand new interview with TimesLeader.com, singer Geoff Tate spoke about his current QUEENSRŸCHE tour, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of the band's "Operation: Mindcrime" album.

"I guess I'm not very nostalgic as a person," Tate said when asked if performing the LP straight through each night bring back any memories from 25 years ago. "I enjoy it immensely, playing this album on this last leg of the tour. It's actually the first time that 'Mindcrime' has been performed live, and by that I mean the musicians actually playing the instruments. With QUEENSRŸCHE, we were always very limited. We had grand ideas and we didn't want to limit ourselves in the studio by saying, 'We can't do that live, so let's not do it on the record.' We didn't want to think in those terms, so when it came time to play the music live, it would require more people on the stage performing than what we could afford, for example, and so what we did was we went the click-track route. When we first started doing this, it was a much more primitive kind of method, but the click track would dictate the song and then we had flown in parts, sections like orchestra and backup vocals and things like that, on tape that would play to fill out the sound and make it sound more like the record. On the plus side, it was very economical to do that. But on the downside, it didn't give us any room to experiment with the songs. We couldn't improvise… You're not even listening to each other play anymore, so you lose that human element of a band that's coming together and you're not playing with each other anymore. With the presentation I'm involved with now with the guys, we're playing everything live… It's a much more organic presentation of the music, which for me is incredible because I haven't had that before. It's a whole new frontier. It's a whole new feel to the music, which I find to be incredibly exciting."

Tate also spoke about his vocal technique and whether he has to train consistently to keep his voice in good condition.

"Yeah, well, I have to sing a lot," he said. "The voice is a muscle, you know, and you have to keep working it out. I start pretty early in the morning. When I get up, first thing I start doing scales and humming and that kind of thing and getting my voice up to par. By mid-day, I'm singing fairly loudly and carrying on. It's an all-day kind of thing. It is rather challenging, though, when you're touring because it used to be that you'd go out on the road and you had a show and pretty much you just waited until that point in the day, which is usually evening, before you actually had to sing. But nowadays, the industry being what it is, you get up at four o'clock in the morning for a six o'clock radio show where you have to perform…and then have another appearance later in the day where you're doing things, and then you have a soundcheck and a meet-and-greet and a sound check party, and then you have your performance and then you have another meet-and-greet after that. By the time you get to bed at night, it's two or three in the morning and hopefully you don't have a radio show to do at six again the next day."

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