Geoff Tate will be playing the entirety of Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime album on his current tour, and it’s not because the progressive metal band’s 1988 breakthrough album is celebrating some kind of anniversary.
Nor is it because he and his “United Nations” band don’t have anything else to play.
“I’m doing it because I have a new album that’s out, and it’s the final chapter of the Operation: Mindcrime story,” said Tate, who performs Oct. 2 at Napa Music Hall. “I’m really excited about playing the whole thing altogether. So I’m going to be playing the complete Operation: Mindcrime album, excerpts from Mindcrime II and then a new song or two.”
Those new songs will be taken from Operation: Mindcrime III. It’s now available after all of its songs were put out as singles and played on a tour that began in March 2024 and continues through this year. This is an epic trek that’s in keeping with Tate’s “play everywhere” philosophy.
“There’s a lot of places, and a lot of people who love the music and want to hear it, and so I try to go everywhere I can,” he said. “People like to go to shows, and oftentimes it’s difficult for people to travel a long distance in order to see an artist that they appreciate and they want to see. For me, I think, ‘Well, I’ll just come to you.’
“So I go to a lot of cities that most artists don’t go to,” he continued. “I hit all the major ones, too, but I go to the smaller towns, and I’ve even played villages and places in Europe that are tiny little places.”
Tate, who has played in 66 countries while singing in Queensryche and as a solo artist, has gathered up his band from around the world.
“I have a Brazilian keyboard player,” he said. “I have an Irish guitar player, an Italian guitar player, a French guitar player and an American drummer. They’ve been playing with me for about seven years now, pretty steadily.
“They’re all young, hungry musicians who are exceptional, and they’re all incredibly dedicated to my music, so much that I get a little bit kind of freaked out about it sometimes, because some of the music they know better than I do,” he added.
This music they know better than Tate comes from the two solo albums and the five albums he’s released with bands named Operation Mindcrime and Sweet Oblivion since he was fired by Queensyche in 2012.
The messy divorce that came after Tate and other core members of the band got in a fistfight backstage at a show in Sao Paulo, Brazil, led to a flurry of lawsuits that were eventually settled by giving him only a couple months to use “the original singer of Queensryche” and exclusive rights to perform Operation: Mindcrime and Operation: Mindcrime II, its 2006 sequel.
So, it is a natural progression for Tate to bring the story he has told over the two concept albums to an end with Operation: Mindcrime III.
That story follows its main character, a heroin addict named Nikki, on a path to becoming an assassin for a revolutionary group plotting to overthrow a country’s government that’s led by a mysterious political and religious demagogue, Dr. X.
“The first album introduced the characters and kind of set the tone for what the story was,” Tate explained. “The second album picks up 18 years later, when Nikki is released from prison, and he goes on an all-out revenge assault against Dr. X, and this (third album) is sort of the backstory of why that all happened in the first place.”
So, he continued, the new album is taken from the perspective of Dr. X, what motivates him and why he is the way he is, while mirroring what Nikki is going through.
Writing the sprawling Operation: Mindcrime story over the course of more than 20 years was not unlike the process used by novelists who write sequential books about characters and situations.
“At least for me, the way it worked was I had kind of an outline of what I wanted to say, and then I would treat each song like a chapter in a book, where I would write from that character’s perspective, what was happening in the story,” Tate noted. “And it kind of follows a timeline, chronologically.”
Once the story was written, Tate and his band created the music to fit the emotion of the character, what’s happening in the story and, with special effects, generate feelings to reflect the space where the song is taking place.
“We have a song on the first album called ‘Sweet Sister Mary,’ which is a kind of a three-part song. It’s very long. It’s like 10 minutes, but it takes place in a Catholic church, and we have a choir singing along with the storyline that’s happening,” Tate said.
“And so as a listener, you’re involved from more than just a musical standpoint; it’s also a kind of environmental standpoint,” he added. “You feel like you’re in the middle of the song.”
Those new songs, Tate promises, will fit with the Operation: Mindcrime originals and the intricate, dynamic prog-metal sound of Queensryche and his solo efforts.
“I guess, perhaps, to most people listening, it sounds very similar,” Tate said. “Of course, to me, it sounds very different, because I’m very, very attached. But we really made a conscious effort to try to capture the spirit of the first album and keep it in the same ballpark.”
While Operation: Mindcrime will come to an end, so to speak, when the tour wraps up, probably in 2027, Tate, the 67-year-old singer who has recovered from open heart surgery in 2022, has no plan to retire anytime soon, if at all.
“Mick Jagger—look at that man in his 80s, and still rocking and still dancing and moving around,” Tate noted. “He’s kind of like the singer’s benchmark, in my opinion. As long as Mick Jagger is going, you know, I’ll go too.”
Queensryche’s Geoff Tate performs at 8pm, Oct. 2, Napa Music Hall, 1030 Main St., Napa. napamusichall.com.
