Target Audience Magazine: Over the years, you’ve repeatedly said that you no longer feel inspired to sing selections from the earliest QUEENSRŸCHE albums, especially the most obscure tracks which have not been played on recent tours. Even if you had the inspiration to sing such QUEENSRŸCHE classics now — “Deliverance”, “Child Of Fire”, “Blinded” and “Roads To Madness”, to cite some examples — would you be able to sing them up to the level you once did, or would those notes and style of singing put too much strain on your voice?
Tate: Wow! This misconception is puzzling to me. If one starts at the beginning, my life and my interests can be traced through my music. I do admit, some of those early songs from the EP and the “Warning” album hold different meaning for me now, much like the “dungeons and dragons” of early adolescence now hold a different meaning for most adults. There are several gems on those early records that I still feel strongly about and, as most people who have attended a QUEENSRŸCHE show lately, we as a band picked every song on the set list to reflect our individual favorites and our audience’s favorites. In fact, over the years, we have conducted polls of our fans to get an accurate idea of what people wanted to hear live. I have very fond memories of playing “Rage For Order” in its entirety last year and also “Operation: Mindcrime” in its entirety at the end of our thirty-year-anniversary tour in December of 2011. In fact, the entire anniversary tour setlist was comprised of songs from all our albums.