QUEENSRŸCHE Singer: 'We've Always Written Songs That Can Be On The Radio'

AOL's Noisecreep recently conducted an interview with QUEENSRŸCHE vocalist Geoff Tate about the 20th-anniversary reissue of the band's "Empire" album. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Noisecreep: Is it hard to believe that 20 years have passed since you released "Empire"?

Tate: It's strange. Sometimes it seems like it was just yesterday, and sometimes it feels like it was 100 years ago.

Noisecreep: The album was more melodic, less progressive and less theme-oriented than "Operation Mindcrime". Were you striving to make a more straightforward record?

Tate: I have to kind of disagree with you on the whole commercial thing. We've always written songs that can be on the radio — and that's the definition of commercial. We have lots of songs like that on every record. "Mindcrime" had several singles on it. I think the thing with "Empire" was we had a million-selling record with "Mindcrime", and the record company was saying, "Oh, well we can really score on this if we really sink some money into it." So they threw millions into promoting "Empire". We had TV and all the video outlets, and we made six videos for the album. That's a huge push. If you throw millions and millions of promotional dollars at most anything, you're gonna get some payback, and they definitely got it. The album went triple platinum.

Noisecreep: Did the ballad "Silent Lucidity" break the record?

Tate: It was all a perfectly planned and executed promotional campaign. It started with a track from "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane" movie soundtrack, "Last Time in Paris", that got huge amounts of radio play over the summer. Then when "Empire" came out in the fall, they hit with three singles before they released "Silent Lucidity". There was a single every six weeks that had a video to it as well. And then they hit with "Silent Lucidity", which they figured was gonna be their biggest hit — or what they threw all their money into — and yeah, it worked. It hit number four on the pop chart and then they followed that with two more singles that did even better. It was great.

Noisecreep: Did you know "Silent Lucidity" was the standout track the moment you recorded it?

Tate: It's funny. "Silent Lucidity" was actually written on acoustic guitar, like a lot of our songs. We start on acoustic and then we add different instruments to it later and modify it. But we had recorded "Silent Lucidity", and our producer Peter Collins said, "You know, it's a good song, but it just doesn't do it for me. I don't think it's strong enough to go on the record." And our guitarist Chris DeGarmo and I were talking to him about it, and we said, "Well, Michael Kamen is going to write some orchestration to this and we think it will really change the song quite a bit." It wasn't until the end of the recording session that Michael got back to us with the orchestrations. And when we got them in the mail we listened to the playback and it was just beautiful. He came up with this gorgeous, lush orchestra for it and when the song was over Peter was grinning and he said, "OK, my mind is changed now."

Read the entire interview from Noisecreep.