QUEENSRŸCHE Singer Says They're 'Halfway Done' Recording New Album

QUEENSRŸCHE singer Geoff Tate spoke to Ferrante's Power Equipment
about the group's current tour and their forthcoming CD, the next chapter to the 1988 ground-breaking concept album, "Operation: Mindcrime", tentatively titled "Operation: Mindcrime II". A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

Ferrante's Power Equipment: When you first wrote "Operation: Mindcrime", did you think there would be a second part?

Geoff Tate: "Well, really, when we wrote the [original] record 'Mindcrime', it was kinda of a done deal in my mind at that point. But we had left the storyline open in the end, so it left us with going in and opening it up the story again. But I really haven't thought about it for a lot of years. We get a lot of fan requests and people asking questions about the story, like 'What happened to this character? Why does this happen?' So hopefully this story, the continuation, will answer a lot of questions.

Ferrante's Power Equipment: Has there been a rejuvenation in the band as you get your arms around "Operation: Mindcrime II"?

Geoff Tate: "It's at different levels for different people. I can only speak for myself. I don't like speaking for the other guys because they are their own people, but for me, I love making music. I'm a musician. I've done this all my life and I love working on projects, brainstorming and other things.

"When you get an idea to go with something working with a band is sometimes a difficult thing because you're trying to get everyone on your page and to get everyone excited about what your vision is. Sometimes you can get everyone on the page and sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can get half the people and sometimes a quarter of the people. You just never really know. Everyone is moving in their own lives, their own sphere of interests and difficulties, their own personal issues or family issues and we're all different ages to so we're all experiencing things at different times. It's really difficult to get everybody 100 percent clued into what you're doing. And then, of course, you got varying degrees of intelligence and scope; how people accept information, where they take it and how much they can take and so on.

"Getting a project for a band that everybody is going to be fueled and excited in the same way, I think, is nearly an impossibility. When we first did the 'Mindcrime' record, it took me probably six months to talk everyone into the idea. Nobody was really interested in doing it. I just pushed and pushed and became a real pain in everybody's ass and pretty soon, six months had gone by, and there was some interest from Chris (DeGarmo, ex-guitarist). He got involved a little bit more and then once he got involved more he was able to get Michael (Wilton, guitar) involved. And you know, those guys were really slow in accepting the idea. But it was like, 'Let's see what we can do with it.' And thus they take more of a backseat role in the creation of it, which is fine, because every band can't have all alpha personalities or all leaders, there's got to be followers, too.

"So, where we are right now? We are 40-year-old men who have played a lot of music in our lives. We have toured around the world. We play like 26 different countries every year. We love playing music and love doing what we do. We're very used to it and we try to get everybody on the same page and excited about what's going on to the best of our abilities. And so far, I'd say, there's general excitement in the band about making this record. There's been a lot of work already done on it. We're about halfway done recording and planning to have it all finished up by spring and into the record companies hands by that time. Hopefully, it will be released in the fall."

Read Geoff Tate's entire interview with Ferrante's Power Equipment at this location.