QUEENSRŸCHE: Upcoming Collection To Include New DEGARMO Co-Penned Track

RockConfidential.com conducted an interview with QUEENSRŸCHE frontman Geoff Tate earlier today (July 3). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

RockConfidential.com: The new CD/DVD "Live at the Moore" sets are out today. Would you say this release is the most ambitious of your career?

Tate: Yeah. I would definitely classify it as that! It's been a really long, long project. The album itself started back around 1990 and we never finished it. It was always on the back burner. We just weren't ready for it. We finally got the album done and putting it out was a real milestone for us. Deciding to film the whole thing was a really great idea at the time, but I remember somewhere along the six month of planning it that I was questioning my sanity! Getting everybody in line — we went through about three or four editors and a couple of directors. It was really quite an ordeal. What we got at the end of the day was a really good filming of the show. It's something very special for the fans.

RockConfidential.com: Planning it and pulling it off sounds like a huge task, but you're only halfway there. Editing is a huge process, too. How involved were you in going through the footage and the final edits?

Tate: I was very involved. I've done these video projects before and you can learn as you go. The first impulse is to film everything. If you really film everything you'll just have so much stuff to look through. It's weeks and weeks of looking at footage and marking sections. You sit in this dark room staring at a computer screen for weeks and weeks and it drives you crazy! This time we decided to do it a little differently. We filmed it all over two nights. We had a set amount of cameras so we only had so much footage to go through. We just made sure we had it right. The band was very well rehearsed. We'd been on tour for a while and we were very comfortable with it. It's all about the planning — what cameras to use, what angles to shoot from. Pre-planning definitely helps when you're looking at all the footage. You'll end up with five good shots to pick from instead of 16 bad ones!

RockConfidential.com: Would you say that "Operation: Mindcrime" is the defining record for QUEENSRŸCHE? Is that a good thing or not?

Tate: It's definitely a milestone for the band. Up until the time we did the first "Mindcrime" we'd been playing around with themes on our albums and writing about certain concepts. We'd never done a full story. That was our first conceptual piece that told a story. That was a big creative step for us. It was eventually so well received and so many people related to that story and those songs. Through performing it a few hundred times it really helped cement it into the minds of the audience. We like to experiment with our music and take each record in a different step from the last. We try to keep progressing as writers. Some people say we ask a lot from our audience. We're not just a brand name that keeps pumping out the same thing each time. Some people have a bit of a hard time accepting that. In a way I think it's been great for our career. We have a lot of longevity here — 28 years as a band. I think it's because we experiment and keep it fresh for our audience.

RockConfidential.com: There's a new hits collection ["Sign of the Times: Best Of"] coming out next month. How involved did you get to be on this one?

Tate: That's a real cool one. It's a two-record set. It's got songs that were hits, some live versions, some studio versions that didn't get used. There's also a disc of rarities. Chris DeGarmo and I recently wrote a song that's going to be included on that called "Justified". There's also some really weird stuff. Before I was in QUEENSRŸCHE I was in a band called MYTH. We wrote a lot of original songs and then the band broke up. I took those songs and brought them to QUEENSRŸCHE and we made different songs out of them. We retained a lot of lyrics and melodies. We've include those songs. Fans can see how inspiration for some of those songs came about. It's fun to hear that. There was a song that QUEENSRŸCHE originally wrote called "Waiting for the Kill" that didn't make the "Warning" album. Our producer at the time thought we needed to go back to the drawing board with that song. Chris, Michael and I re-wrote the song and turned it into "NM 156" which ended up on the album. You'll get to hear it in its original form and you can hear how we took it apart and turned it into something new.

RockConfidential.com: You mentioned working with Chris DeGarmo again. How did that come together and are there future plans to work together?

Tate: We've talked about working together again. We had a really good time working on this new song. It was fun hanging out again. We talked about doing other projects together — outside of QUEENSRŸCHE. It's definitely a possibility.

RockConfidential.com: You've got dates scheduled through December. Is there a break anytime soon?

Tate: Well, we really weren't going to tour much this year. We were going to lay low and work on another studio album. We're doing that now. Some of these dates came up that we just couldn't say no to. We're going to work around the recording schedule. We have a couple of dates this month. The HEAVEN AND HELL tour starts in September for about five weeks. Then we go to Europe with THIN LIZZY and then we're home for Christmas. We're going out on a U.S. tour in January that's about five weeks. We're going to try to finish the record then.

RockConfidential.com: How's the new record progressing?

Tate: It's going really well. It's very adventurous for us. It's a theme record. I wouldn't say it a story, but all the songs are related to one topic.

Read the entire interview at RockConfidential.com.