Former Queensryche vocalist Geoff Tate is set to release a new chapter of the band’s popular Operation: Mindcrime series for the first time in nearly 20 years.
Operation: Mindcrime III arrives May 3 and as the frontman told UCR in a recent interview, the project has been taking shape in his mind for a number of years now. “I think it was 2020, actually, when the inspiration really started happening with that and I started thinking in terms of making another [Mindcrime] record.”
The newest installment is the first one outside of the Queensryche name, with Tate working instead with his solo band members, including guitarist Kieran Robertson, who wrote many of the songs on the upcoming album with the singer..
“Power,” the first single from Operation: Mindcrime III, made its debut on streaming services earlier this week. During our conversation with Tate, he told us about how the new album came together and as you’ll read below, he also shared some of his memories behind the original Mindcrime album.
Here are some excerpts from that discussion. You can also hear our entire interview with Geoff below.
Storytelling is a big part of making albums like Operation: Mindcrime and that’s a skill that some people have to develop. What’s the moment you remember where that started to lock in for you?
Well, I think when Chris DeGarmo was in the band and we were working together, we talked a lot about writing and what we wanted to do with the music. And our motto at the time was really no limits. We didn’t want to kind of give into public opinion, tastes, genres, and that kind of thing.
We really wanted to pursue our musical vision, and we were very dedicated to that, that idea for years and years and years. And we were both very influenced and shaped by music from the ’60s and ’70s, especially storytelling records, concept records like, you know, the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, for example. And for me, Genesis, their Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album was a big influence for me.
Albums like that really kind of shaped our musical vocabulary, you know. And then when we got together and started working together, we shared those records with each other and found, you know, a lot of common ground in what we felt and believed about writing. And so really, I think the [Queensryche] Rage for Order album was when we really started taking it seriously and following kind of theme-oriented sections of the album.
Listen to Queensryche’s ‘I Dream in Infrared’
And then, we just kind of put the pedal to the metal with Operation: Mindcrime. We really had serious talks about [how] we wanted to do a full blown concept record. We just didn’t have the storyline at the time. So finally, when that happened, I brought the story in and Chris liked the idea, and we started working on Mindcrime.
It was really a lot of communication and a lot of talking, you know, like, oh, I really want to do this, and I want to do it this way, and I do too, and I want to do this and this and we should do this and take the music this way. It was a lot of enthusiasm of young men writing music for the first time and traveling the world and being influenced by everything that was going on at the time. Which proved to kind of be our further education, so to speak. You know, some people go to college and we went traveling the world,
Working on Mindcrime, how much did it reach a level at any point where you felt like maybe you all had bitten off more than you could chew as a group for where you were? There were a lot of things in play.
Yes, as you said, there were a lot of things in play and we just happened to be in the best possible place we could be at the time. We had a wonderful idea. We had talented musicians playing with us. Peter Collins was producing us, who was an amazing, amazing producer.
We went into the whole thing with that in mind and we all felt like we were really loaded for bear, as they say. You know, we had so much ammunition going in and we had the complete record already written when we first started working with Peter. When he came in, he just took all our ideas and fine tuned them and boom, you know, four months later, we had a record.
Watch Queensryche’s ‘I Don’t Believe in Love’ Video
How much did Peter help you guys shape some of the classic songs like “Eyes of a Stranger” and “I Don’t Believe in Love?”
Peter actually had a lot of influence in arrangement of the songs. With “I Don’t Believe in Love,” for example, we didn’t have a lot of the breaks that you hear. There’s kind of a release that happens after the first verse, And before we go into the second verse, it just comes down to a simple bass guitar and drum kind of thing. You know, who didn’t have any of that in there.
He really liked some of the offbeat pushes that Scott [Rockenfield] and Eddie [Jackson] did previously in some of the other verses, He said, ‘Oh, you should work that into every verse, because it’s really effective’ and things like that. He was very good at recognizing when something was good, and saying, Yeah, do that again.
For me, I had this story and I was trying to get it across. Peter would say, “Okay, I see what you’re trying to do, but you’re not quite hitting it. But what I think you should try to do is approach it this way.” And he wouldn’t tell you the answer. He would just point you in the right direction, you know, which I loved. And probably because he didn’t have the answer, but he knew where I could get the answer if I moved in that direction. He was very, very good to work with. I really enjoyed it
READ MORE: How Queensryche Created Their Future With ‘Operation: Mindcrime’
How much did he help you with the way the album progresses and flows?
Yeah, well one thing that he did say, and it really kind of came home for me, is that I had these ideas about dialogue and I wanted to create these scenes in between the songs to kind of set the tone. And he said, “Well, look, if you’re going to go that route, you’ve got to do it right, If you’re talking about speaking parts and acting, you know have to do it right.” You’ve got to have quality acting, basically.
It sounded like good advice. And he says, “Okay, well, what we should do is we should map out in outline form and script form, what’s going to happen. Who are the people involved in the the scene? Where is the scene taking place?” We approached it just like you would do if you’re going to write a storyline or write a movie script, you know, you set the scene.
We went to such great detail. We’re trying to figure out how big the room was. So when the nurse is walking through the room, how many steps she would take and what reverb you’d hear because of the room size and things like that. It was really detailed information.
Watch Queensryche’s ‘Revolution Calling’ Video
And then, like, we had the voice of Dr X, saying, “Kill her. That’s all you’ve got to do.” He said, “Look, we got to get a professional actor, [to do that voice]. So I’m going to arrange for us to hold auditions for people to come in and we’re going to have them read the line and judge which one’s the best for the part.”
We had 10 or 11 people show up for the audition, and they all tried doing it. One guy came in. He was, like, a Shakespearean actor, and he was like, “Kill her!” And we were just like, rolling on the floor. “Oh no, no, no, no. it can’t be that guy.” But yeah, it took like 10 or 11 tries before we found the right guy.
Anthony Valentine came in and did it and knocked it out of the park. All of that work, all that stuff, is incredibly important to the record. And at the time, especially, people hadn’t heard a lot of that going on in records. It was pretty much song after song after song after song and and now you had this record that had voices happening and there was rain and thunder going on.
There was a church and a limousine with the window coming down. It was a whole different [kind of record]. It was like a headphone experience and that’s the way we wanted to try to design the record was for headphones, because Chris and I were really into the headphone music,
Nowadays it’s just sort of common for people to wear headphones all the time. Now, you know, [they’re] walking around, living life with headphones on. But at the time, headphones were a thing with a wire,and you had to stay in one place. We didn’t have the portable things we have [today]. Now, it’s a different world.
Watch Queensryche’s ‘Eyes of a Stranger’ Video
Are you still in touch with Chris DeGarmo?
No. I haven’t talked to him in a decade. I think….probably about a decade.We had a lot in common for, you know, the beginning of our, our writing time, you know, our, our our musical beginnings and then as time went on, we just sort of drifted off. That really was what we had in common, was the music. You know, we didn’t have a lot of commonality in other areas of our life, to keep a friendship going. It’s a relationship that played out over time.
What did you appreciate about Chris as a writer? It’s striking how many songs the two of you collaborated on that are now fan favorites.
Well, I really enjoyed his openness, you know, to ideas, and he was clever with the writing, and he wanted to push his own musicality, which he really did. He surprised me all the time with things he came up with. I really enjoyed that about his personality. You know that he was inquisitive and he could figure things out.
He actually, along with Michael Wilton, they did some amazing stuff with the guitar. A lot of times, musicians would listen to a Queensryche song and I would ask them to play it and they go, “Oh yeah, I got that.” And they start playing and they can’t play it. They’re not playing it the right way.
Listen to Geoff Tate and Kieran Robinson on the ‘UCR Podcast’
Chris and Michael spread the guitar chords out and created inversions of the chord. Instead of each of them playing the same thing, they played a part of the chord each, which was really unique and different. It actually added [a lot] and created that Queensryche guitar sound that people are always talking about and looking for. So they were really innovators with that and much respect for them for pursuing it and defining it and perfecting it.
Geoff Tate’s Operation: Mindcrime III arrives May 3. The album is available for preorder now at his official website.
Listen to Geoff Tate’s ‘Power’
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