Enter for your chance to win a Queensryche autographed ESP LTD MW-600 electric guitar!
Signed by the whole band, it’s a perfect replica of the guitar played by Michael Wilton on tour!
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Purchase will not increase chances of winning. Open only to legal residents of the U.S./D.C. (excluding Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam), 18 and older (or 19 and older for residents of AL and NE) at time of entry. Void where prohibited. To enter: Visit www.americansoldieralbum.com between 3/27/09 and 6/8/09 and follow online instructions to submit entry. Limit one (1) entry per person/address/email address. Subject to Official Rules available HERE.
Episode 0015 – “Middle of Hell” – Geoff Tate explains the meaning behind Track #7 on American Soldier.
“There’s a song on the album called Middle of Hell, that has an interesting story to it. One of the soliders was telling me that he has just gotten back from Iraq. Part of his duties were these intercity patrols in Humvees. They go out into the city and conduct their patrols….”
REMINDER:
Hair Nation (Sirius 23 / XM 41)
Hair Nation’s American Soldier Weekend
Starts: Friday, March 27th @ 6pm ET
Ends: Monday, March 30th @ 3am ET
Description:
For those who serve and for those who rock… Hair Nation’s got your back! Every good soldier deserves a rockin’ soundtrack and during Hair Nation’s American Soldier weekend we’re handing over our programming to the soldiers, their families and their friends. So if you know a soldier and want to play their favorite 80’s-90’s hard rock song, email us now (hyperlink to hairnation@siriusxm.com), and every request that makes it on air will be emailed to you (mp3), just in case you want to send it to the dedicated soldier.
In addition, every hour Hair Nation will have Geoff Tate and Scott Rockenfield from Queensryche, introduce and play songs off their new release American Soldier (out in stores March 31st and the inspiration behind this specialty weekend), plus songs from the awesome Queensryche catalog. Sirius XM gives our soldiers the music they need to protect the country they love, and for that we salute you!
Peace in a celebrated cloud of music…
Wednesday, April 1st, 8:30pm to 10:00pm Pacific time.
Call in number to ask Queensryche questions: 1-800-344-7625
The first two segments will be interview, and the rest of the show will
be QR performing live.
Those who are fortunate enough to work on our show are aware that we have a pretty cool gig. Alright, maybe cool, cubed. We do close to 100 shows a year and they’re all different, every one of them, we never know what’s going to happen and they’re done with some of the most interesting and intelligent people on the planet. Occasionally, we think we know what’s going to happen beforehand and then each show takes on a life of its own. There’s an old saying, “luck is the residue of design”. If you establish possibilities of what could happen, of what you want to have happen and then of it actually taking place, then your “luck” is going to be a whole lot better. Occasionally a show, before it’s actually even taken place, displays particular potential for greatness. This is one of those shows, without hesitation. First is the subject material itself. The forthcoming album by Queensryche, “American Soldier”, is as gripping, compelling, captivating, gut-wrenching and candid tour de force of storytelling as one might imagine and yet it’s also hauntingly beautiful, through the caring, the sense of duty and of brotherhood displayed by the American soldiers who serve as narrators. Then you add music, passionate and stirring, moving and heartfelt, which puts the genius of Geoff Tate lyric’s in full delight. When is the last time you got misty listening to a Rock album? Get ready; this is a heavy duty out of body, out of country experience you’ll embark upon. Add to this a live, full band, plugged-in, turn up the juice, electric, it goes to eleven, incendiary performance, featuring new songs and some of Queensryche’s best loved creations from the past with your calls, some calls from real, honest to god, life-on-the -line American heroes and we’re thinking this looks pretty good on paper. Oh yeah, it’s the national radio preview too. This is looking like a good plan, some real potential here.
A funny thing usually happens with shows like this though, you hope they’re going to be special and then they actually begin. They take on a life of their own, unplanned gems from fleeting moments begin to collect and intrigue and suddenly there is a realization that something truly special is taking place. Cool to the power of three. The last time Queensryche performed live in our stellar recording studio (we don’t do the show from a radio station) was the stuff of immediate legend. People who weren’t there have since claimed to have been. Attendance tripled. With the supercharged atmosphere of American Soldier as the back drop, as the raison d’être and the energy of a live performance, this show has been circled on our calendars since the beginning of the year. Take a visit to Queensryche.com and listen to Tate explain in depth how the songs took shape, what he and the band were trying to achieve, how they got there, the inspiration of the songs and the era they represent. This is a statement that spans decades, fronts, continents, personalities, experiences and a range of emotions as dramatic as the Cascades. The Seattle based band is without equal or compare.
You might want to check this one out. Maybe we’ll get “lucky”. It’s Queensryche on the next ROCKLINE!
Episode 0014 – “The Killer” – Geoff Tate explains the meaning behind Track #6 on American Soldier.
“During the Vietnam era there was a feeling from a lot of people that being in the military was a bad thing, that you were a killer. There was a term called “baby killer”, due to an unfortunate situation that occurred in one of the conflicts in Vietnam. So this idea of the killer being something negative…”
Tune into Headbanger’s Ball this Saturday night to see interview clips with Geoff Tate as well as the broadcast premiere of the “If I Were King” video. Headbanger’s Ball airs on MTV2 this Saturday, March 28, at 10PM.
For more information, please visit: http://www.mtv.com/mtv2/
Geoff Tate of Queensryche has created a monster of a wine. 2007 Insania has already sold out, but this year brings a new vintage that will be sure to rock your socks off.
Click here to place your 2008 Insania pre-order today:
As with last year’s vintage, Tate created Insania, a red Bordeaux blend, with Three Rivers winemaker Holly Turner. Read about his winemaking experience in this insightful article from Wine Spectator Magazine.
If you missed out on the 2007 Insania, you still have a chance to purchase a bottle. Whole Foods Markets has a limited supply remaining and will make them available for sale during two personal appearances by Geoff and Holly. See the schedule to the right for times and places.
Cheers!
Amy Locati
Three Rivers Winery
locati@threeriverswinery.com
Meet Geoff Tate and Holly Turner at these upcoming bottle signing events:
Friday, April 17th 2009
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Redmond Whole Foods
17991 Redmond Way
Redmond, WA 98052
425-881-2600
Saturday, May 30th 2009
12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Chandler Whole Foods
2955 W. Ray Road
Chandler, AZ 85224
480-821-9447
The band, Fan Club and Rhino Records are happy to announce the band’s new iTunes page! Still available are all the album releases, but what’s new are the music videos (all 18 of them) each for $1.99.
Taken from the site: “Progressive metal didn’t even exist when Queensryche formed in the early ’80s, but its first full-length, The Warning, put the heavy/heady hybrid on the map, with Geoff Tate’s theatrical, Peter Gabriel-on-steroids vocal style and twin-guitar riffs that mixed the raw power of classic metal with the epic reach of art rock. With 1988’s Operation: Mindcrime, the band unveiled its full-blown conceptual masterstroke – a Dark Side of the Moon for the metal age. Queensryche made its mark on the mainstream with the follow-up, Empire, whose string-soaked ballad “Silent Lucidity” went Top 10, but even after grunge and nu-metal signaled a sea change, the band of prog-metal pioneers kept things current, streamlining its sound without sacrificing an ounce of melodic smarts.
In this era of iTunes and YouTube the notion of a concept album has been all but killed as a function of digital technologies and the Internet. Gone are the days of “Tommy” and “The Wall” when a listener would drop the needle and let an album to play all the way through. (The LP format demanded it as much as facilitated it. A scratch was forever.) Now music fans browse their favorite e-commerce sites and choose what tracks to download based on 30-second snippets.
Not that I’m judging, of course. I’m as guilty as the next Web surfer. I have hundreds of albums, cassette tapes, and CDs strewn across my home office, but I seldom, if ever, download complete albums. This phenomenon isn’t lost on the minds that create the music. The market drives artist activity and resultantly few of them think in terms of relating dimensions of a single story across an album’s tracks.
But all is not lost for those valiant holdouts who still have attention spans that last longer than, say, four minutes and twenty seconds. Queensryche’s latest effort, “American Soldier,” is a concept album in the tradition of the greats — one that merits end-to-end consideration. What Jerry Lewis used to say about his telethon holds true for “American Soldier”: “If you miss a little you miss a lot.”
The album opens with the strident voice of every squad leader yelling, “On your feet!” signaling that the band has stepped off the line of departure wearing a warfighter’s boots. The elements of combat inform songs like “Hundred Mile Stare,” “If I Were King” (also the album’s first video, which had its world premiere at Military.com), and “The Killer.” Voices of real vets weave in and out of the tunes, giving the narrative a transcendent company-street cred. Aviators are also brought into the battle with the slow build of “At 30,000 feet.”
“American Soldier” also tackles themes of war beyond the fighting. “Remember Me” deals with couples who deal with the pitfalls and pressures of getting married right before a war rotation. (Key lyric: “I don’t know what the future holds, I’m sorry if this seems too cold; a man conflicted in his head, makes poor choices, regrets the words he says.” But the subject sums up his thoughts with “All I want from you is for you to tell me that you miss me.”) “Home Again” opens with a voice that states, “It’s very hard to keep a family together when you’re halfway across the world. A lot of us are dads; a lot of us are husbands, and we’re just counting the days to get home.” From there the song morphs into a poignant exchange between father and daughter. (The girl singing is actually lead singer Geoff Tate’s daughter.)
My main concern when I first heard about this project was the “Soldiers as victims” trap that these sorts of projects (whether albums, films, or books) too often fall into. Too often the only takeaway from the military experience is trauma, heartache, and personal devastation. (I generally think of Metallica’s “One” as the perfect cartoon-ish example of this phenomenon.)
But “American Soldier” deftly avoids this trap, primarily because Tate developed the concept by letting servicemembers, including his father, and families tell their stories without clouding the message with his own preconceived notion. In fact, in a recent podcast interview at Military.com, when I asked Tate what he learned about the military by virtue of putting the album together, he said, “I learned I knew nothing going into this.” The album isn’t a recruiting poster, necessarily, but it’s an honest reading of what happens when brave Americans are sent to war.
From a musical point of view “American Soldier” is well-produced, aptly complex, and hook-laden. My acid test of a good album has always been whether or not it gets better with each listening, and “American Soldier” does. There are no throw-aways on this one, but for me the standout tracks (read “download now”) are “Hundred Mile Stare,” “If I Were King,” “Remember Me,” and “Home Again.”
So walk a few clicks in the boots of “American Soldier” and rediscover the concept album. Along the journey through war you might recognize yourself or someone close to you. You might even learn something. And, of equal importance considering the medium, you will rock.
Episode 0013 – “Dead Man’s Words” – Geoff Tate explains the meaning behind Track #5 on American Soldier.
“One of the tracks on the album was a really, really wonderful experience to create and that’s Dead Man’s Words. This was inspirated by one of the interviews we did, early on, where a soldier was shot down in a helicopter behind enemy lines. One of the codes of the military is no man left behind …”
