QUEENSRŸCHE Singer Says His New Solo Album Is 'Really Hard Rock'

Casey Pukl of AnthologySD.com recently conducted an interview with QUEENSRŸCHE lead singer Geoff Tate. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

AnthologySD.com: I'd love to get into what you've been up to since we saw you in January! I know you've been touring with these acoustic shows, working on that solo record you mentioned last time…

Geoff Tate: That's exactly what I've been doing (laughs). Been playing lots of shows, working on the album — that's recorded now, so I'm happy about that. I don't know exactly when it's coming out, but I think it'll be around the fall. That all changes weekly depending on the record company's schedule, but we're working on it.

AnthologySD.com: Any hints as to what the new record is going to sound like? I know you said it was going to be quite a departure from what you've done in the past.

Geoff Tate: Well, it's very different from my last one for sure. It's a new bunch of people I've been working with to write and record it, so that changes things. When you're working with different people, it really changes the record. This one is really hard rock. The last one was really all over the place with different styles of music and everything, but this one really keeps with the hard rock style. It does it in kind of a different way — more of my way or what I would envision. I guess it's experimental in some ways, while in others it's very traditional. What I tried to do was take traditional rock instrumentation and apply it in kind of a different song structure. That's what I would best describe it as. [laughs] Music is kind of like that. It's a personal journey. It's hard to describe. I would never want to be a music journalist. [laughs] It's very hard to describe music! I'd rather just listen to it, and come up with my own conclusions. It can be taken so many ways and interpreted so many different ways. People can always apply that song to their own lives and life experiences. Over the years, I've had so many people tell me completely different stories about songs I've written and what they mean to them. They remember when they first heard the song, what they were doing, where they were, how it's affected their life. So often it's so different of a story than what the song means to me. I always find that kind of interesting. Why that happens, I don't know. Music is one of those things that just becomes the background music for people's lives in a lot of respects.

AnthologySD.com: Last time we spoke, you were discussing branching out into different genres, and you made a comment that if someone offered you a million dollars to sing "Danny Boy", you wouldn't be able to do it. Have you been learning more of other people's songs in this time? What have you been doing to really expand?

Geoff Tate: Well, typically when I put together a record, I have a vision for it. I know what I want to accomplish. While I always reach the goal, the path is always different from what I think it will be. [laughs] Sometimes I think that's the way that it has to be — especially when you're working with a group of people. Everyone has their own input and their own interpretation of what the music means to them. For an experiment, I set an outline for the people I'm working with, and said something like I really want like a really sexy kind of song here as an example. Give me some music that you would listen to if you were making love. Man [laughs], the stuff I get is just so different! What somebody thinks of when you give them an outline like that is just so different from what I think. I found that that was just too vague of a description, and I needed to get more specific with it. We're doing something that has sort of an uplifting and spiritual feel to it. I needed a chorus for that, and what's uplifting and spiritual to one person is not at all to another person. It's really strange, but that's kind of the process. You have to try and find and adhere to it when you're making a record. You have to try a lot of different roads in order to get to the destination somehow.

Read the entire interview from AnthologySD.com.