GEOFF TATE On His New Version Of QUEENSRŸCHE: 'There's A Lot Of Love In The Band And Friendship'

Craig Terlino of Dig Boston recently conducted an interview with singer Geoff Tate of QUEENSRŸCHE. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Dig Boston: How has the "Operation: Mindcrime" stage performance evolved since you first started taking it on the road?

Tate: The beauty of music and performing music live, you can present yourself in a number of different ways. It really depends on your imagination and how you look at those two events. I've presented it as a theatrical presentation, with actors that can help tell the story. The way we're presenting it now brings us back to the beginning of when I first played the album live with the imagery and intensity. It's one of the only albums that translate live and you can play in its entirety. It really holds the audience's attention. With this band especially, it's a group of really fine musicians that bring a new vitality and new perspective to the music, especially for me since I've been playing these songs every night.

Dig Boston: The new lineup must bring a different energy to these songs considering they also come from playing with legendary metal bands.

Tate: I really enjoy the camaraderie on stage with this group of people. It's exceptional and something I've never experienced. There's a lot of love in the band and friendship and it's great to have people around enjoying what they are doing. That translates to the music and the music translates to the audience and the audience gives it back to us. It's impossible to catch something like that on video. It's something you feel when you're in the room.

Dig Boston: There is a careful line to walk when merging certain forms of art with technology. In music, a transition from manual to analog to digital has certainly changed the face of how music and art is experienced. It's always a question of embracing it or being enslaved by it.

Tate: That's a huge subject and one that I find incredibly fascinating. We have a sense to be cognitively lazy when we start depending on these things we've invented rather than looking at them more objectively and in a limited way. When you stop embracing life, we become observers. The great analogy I think is reality TV. We sit at home and watch other people living their lives. Our lives become what we are doing at that moment, what is watching. We spend hours of our lives each day watching other people having these experiences. And our experiences are very limited. We're the viewer rather than the participator. That's a fascinating thing about human development. What will that mean? There's a lot of speculation to say texting, for example, and how that is affecting conversation and how it's probably going to become a very limiting thing where human beings actually sit and have a one on one with each other. We'll become so used to cryptic sentences that the ability to describe something will become very limited. We change our outlook in the way we construct our language now with the technology we use now so preferably. All these things are an example of how technology has changed us. It's maybe not for the better, but certain things have made our lives much better.

Read the entire interview at Dig Boston.