Track by Track by Geoff Tate
“SLIVER”
“Sliver” is the introduction of the soldier into the environment of soldierdom. It’s time to grow up and let go of your childhood experiences and move into the world arena. They use the phrase, “welcome to the show” – they call warfare “the show” – and that’s one of the main lyric lines of the song. These lines were all taken from interviews and are the way people talk about it – “This shit’s for real, this isn’t some easy, make believe situation…”
“UNAFRAID”
“Unafraid” is an interesting song, it’s different. We wanted to let the words of the soldiers speak on their own, so we used their interviews as the lyrics, and all the verses are the soldiers talking back and forth. It is two soldiers talking about different time frames – one Vietnam and the other Kosovo – and you’d think they were talking about the same conflict, because they were saying the same things. Musically, it’s a pretty adventurous track, it’s very different from anything Queensrÿche has ever done before. Not only do we have other people doing the verses, but they’re not even singing – they’re speaking. We had elements of the music beforehand, riffs and pieces, and then we constructed the music around the verses. If you listen, the guitar in the verses is in mono, not stereo, so you have room to hear what they’re saying. On the chorus, the music goes to stereo again. There’s a lot of that going on with the record, which is what makes it so effective with headphones. You really get that experience of things moving, shifting and changing in your head. It’s a very interesting way to experience it. There’s the line, “You do what you know you have to do, somebody has to stand in the gap…” After you experience war and that hand-to-hand combat, you are unafraid, because you just experienced and imagined hell, and lived. What do you have to be afraid of? “I fear nothing, I am unafraid…”
“HUNDRED MILE STARE”
This is one of my favorite songs on the collection. I like the idea of what this song is saying, and the lyrics are almost hard for me to sing, because the guy is saying, “Whatever happened to people feeling a conviction and having faith in an idea and a belief? People can’t stand their ground. I’ve always known that it’s very black and white and I have no fear of any judgment. The military has taught me that…” I find that statement to be really challenging, because I’m one of those vacillators that goes back and forth and try to think of every angle and the cause and effect. That’s definitely not me talking! [Laughing] In the chorus, I really like how they get into this mentality where they bark like dogs when they go in for an attack. These guys come on like a force. If you’ve played a sport, or are a musician on a roll writing music, you know the unstoppable feeling – that’s what these guys are trying to get. It’s a combat song, really. It’s one of my favorite melodic Queensrÿche songs that we’ve done, it’s got really beautiful parts.
“AT 30,000 FT.”
This song is about a pilot and their experience, which is very different from ground personnel. Pilots have a very different perspective on things, a very different job. The song deals with this particular soldier’s feelings of being separate from the devastation that he was inflicting. He’s above it all, flying 30,000 feet in the air, dropping bombs on targets then going back to the base. He’s not involved in ground combat where you stare someone in the face and kill them hand-to-hand. He said it’s a strange feeling to know that you’ve just wiped out an entire city with a touch of a button, and then you’re back at the bass watching reruns of a TV show. It’s just another day at the office, there’s no emotional attachment to it like a guy who was in a platoon and may have lost buddies. The pilot is dealing with a whole different set of issues that is a lot harder to define… I wrote this song, then months later I got a chance to play it for Lynn, the pilot I wrote it about, and we have it on camera. He was reading it and tears were running down his face. I asked him what moved him, and he said the line, “their tortured, painful cries will never fall upon my ears, and never stain my elder years. My heartbeat is all I’ll feel.” He said that’s what he feels every day. He was disconnected, but he does still think about it every day… Actually, when the breakdown happens and the bombing is taking place, Michael wanted the guitar solo to be representative of the airplane flying over the city dropping missiles and bombs.
“DEAD MAN’S WORDS”
This was inspired by a situation that is very prevalent in the military. They have a policy that no soldier is left behind – if somebody is shot down behind enemy lines or in a man-down situation, the military mobilizes and goes and gets them. They do not leave anybody behind. This is a story about a guy who was shot down behind enemy lines, and a group of volunteers went in to rescue him. It’s told from two different perspectives, the guy that was shot down and injured, and the other is the soldier that volunteered to go in and get him. My part was the soldier who was injured, and we had a contest last year and a singer name Vince Solano won the chance to sing on our record, and he plays the part of the guy who comes to rescue me. The story is set in the Middle East, so we try to give the song that feel. To me, it’s very romantic, in a sense, to be seeing desert sand and soldiers driving and hiking to get this guy in the wasteland of sand. It’s such a strong visual idea, I wanted to bring the musical sensibility into the song, so we’ve got the Arabian scale that was so tempting to use, and very fun to play.
“THE KILLER”
Shoot or die, what are you going to do? You have to make that decision. Fundamentally, I think the song is about judgment – making a judgment and standing by your actions. This song wasn’t inspired by any one interview, it was a combination of all of them. Anyone that had ever gone to battle and killed somebody had a perspective that I found interesting – they all said that you have to be the killer if you want to live. The other part of judgment was how other people relate to that. One guy was telling me that his mother wouldn’t even talk to him, because she found what he did as a soldier so disgusting because it went against her religion. She felt so strongly about it that she couldn’t even look him in the face and talk to him about it. There’s a line in here that other people have written before and I have used in songs, “You can’t begin to imagine my life until you’ve done it.” It’s very true.
“MIDDLE OF HELL”
This is a song about being in war, in hell. This came from two different interviews, the first being a guy that was writing a letter home to his dad and came up with that title. The dad said he was going into hell, and the son wrote back that he was right, it was the middle of hell. The other interview was a soldier named Anthony who was a humvee driver in Baghdad and got blown up and almost died. He said that what was really frustrating about that particular job was that you were on patrol on the streets of Baghdad, and it was like being stopped at a stop sign with hundreds of people around, every one of them who could be the enemy with a gun. How do you deal with that? You don’t know who the enemy is, they’re not holding a sign or a flag. They look like everyone else, so you’re on constant alert, watching for something out of the ordinary. He told a story about being back from his tour of duty and he got pulled over by a cop. When he asked what he was doing wrong, the cop said he was driving down the middle of the road. He said he was sorry, but it’s because he had just gotten back from Iraq, and they can’t drive in the actual lanes there because that’s where the bombs are. That inspired the line in the song, “We drive straight down the center line, no mistakes, not like last time, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of hell.” This is a cool song, I get to play saxophone in it, and Michael wrote a guitar solo that plays off the sax, intercepting and colliding at different times. The chorus says, “I’m alright, I’m gonna be alright,” and that’s a mantra these guys constantly repeat to themselves. They may have lost an arm, a leg and an eye, but they’ll still keep telling themselves that they’re going to be alright.
“IF I WERE KING”
This is a song about guilt, about a soldier who lost his friend in a firefight and spent a lot of time feeling guilty, wishing he could have done more to save him. The song is saying that if I were king, if I could do anything, I’d have you back in my life again, back by my side. I thought that was a very interesting and inspiring viewpoint.
“MAN DOWN!”
This was a bizarre story to me. It is about a soldier who came back from his tour of duty and could not feel comfortable. He could not stay in one place. He had to keep moving. He said he was paranoid that everybody was out to get him, kill him, and he wasn’t safe. So he bought a car, packed everything he had into it, and spent six or eight years just driving across the country, back and forth and up and down. That struck me as very David Lynch-like, like a movie. The military has this expression, “Man Down!” which identifies an injured soldier and is a call to organize a rescue. To me, this soldier is in need of rescue because he didn’t have the tools to handle the emotional feelings that he had, and he was injured, in need of assistance. There are a couple of lines in there that are from his description of driving and seeing strange things like “the cavalry of god,” a tour bus with slogans on the side and filled with gospel singers that he kept running into like it was following him.
“REMEMBER ME”
One of the soldiers was telling me about his experience with his wife. He had been married very young, at 19 years old, and the stress of being away from each other and in a very dangerous situation, as well as the age factor, made the relationship one that didn’t last. That seems to be a common thread with a lot of the people I talked to. The song is about him writing her a letter and asking her to remember him.
“HOME AGAIN”
There is lot of emotion attached to this song. The whole idea of separation between loved ones is one of my favorite topics, perhaps because I live and breathe it being away from my kids and my wife quite a bit while touring. You miss them so much, and it’s like you live two separate lives. When you’re a soldier and you’re away, it’s very difficult to bridge those two worlds. The song is inspired by a soldier writing a letter to his daughter who he misses very much, and her writing a letter back to him. He was laughing that what was really cute to him was that they were saying the same thing in the letter and using the same terminology. Those kind of coincidences really get to me. Because it was a father-daughter relationship, I asked my daughter Emily, she’s 10, to sing with me. That was really fun, I’d never done that with one of my kids before. It’s one of the toughest songs to sing for me on the record, it’s in a low key, but she did a good job with it.
“THE VOICE”
The song opens with my father talking. All my life I’ve been waiting for him to open up, but he never has. When he finally did, it was my inspiration for this record, so it only seemed natural to have him on it. Several of the soldiers I interviewed talked about being injured and being on the edge of death and being brought back. That kind of situation is always interesting to me, hearing what they felt, what they saw and what happened. A lot of people in those situations see light and hear voices, and that was the inspiration for that song, the voice you hear in your head. From what I gather, there’s quite a struggle for people at that point. Some people say they’re ready to go, and others will kick and scream. The album ends with the line “Don’t be afraid,” and it’s a very strong phrase that we all grow up with, our parents telling us, “don’t be afraid…” I think if you’re lying there wounded, that’s one of the voices you’d hear in your head, your parents saying it, or maybe it’s God.
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