Dan Peters from Examiner.com spoke with QUEENSRŸCHE drummer Scott Rockenfield recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Examiner.com: You guys have been around since ’81, so is it strange to see metal as a genre and various sub-genres shift and change, coming into prominence and falling out? Do you find that there’s a temptation to grab onto whatever is the nascent sub-genre?

Rockenfield: “I don’t think with us it’s there. It never really has been. We just kind of sit back and do what we do. The fortunate thing with us doing that through the years is that we’ve seen all the trends come and go. All that music is inspiring, we listen to all sorts of stuff, so when things like that happen we’re always open to hearing all this stuff, and in some way I suppose it inspires you to write new music of some fashion. When you speak of metal in the old days, the cool thing we’ve found in our global travels, everywhere we’re going and playing these days, it’s all back. It’s all our thing. Our generation from back then is back. Bands like IRON MAIDEN, they’re playing like 40,000 people a night in some of the foreign countries. That’s huge for those guys. And our business is doing really well, not on the same level as them, but it really depends on where you’re at and what you’re doing. We’re getting crowds, and we’re making huge successful things go on these days. Half the bands we’re out there playing with at some of these festivals are the bands from back in those days. So I think it all cycles around and for us, we just kind of put the blinders on and keep making music, you know. You can’t really worry about too many things other than your own thing. That’s help us for 30 years, keep it going.”

Examiner.com: Bands that have been around for a while, like METALLICA, who’s still kicking around, face an absolute flurry of criticism. Do you find that that happens Queensrÿche the longer you guys stay around?

Rockenfield: “Well, you totally get the 'Mindcrime is still my favorite and you haven’t made the same type of record since, but I still like what you do.’ There’s always these people that, for some reason, you touched them at some point in their lives. There’s new people that go ‘Listen, your new record is touching me,’ or ‘My 15-year-old only listens to your new record because that’s really all he know right now,’ but then he checks out the old stuff. To answer your question, we do. You keep going.

I’m a huge RUSH fan, they’re one of the reasons I even started playing drums, but my favorite CD is Moving Pictures or Hemispheres. Back in those days, you know. I enjoy they’re new stuff, but it’s not my favorite. But they’re still going, still doing their thing. They go out and they play great shows, and they just carry on. You can only, I guess, top yourself. You’re always just making music, and people are either going to enjoy it or are going to enjoy it less than some of the others, I suppose. It’s hard to kind of think about it. You just kind of do what you do and move on.

I think one of the best records we made, one of my favorite records to this day still, is Promised Land. Just because of the way we did it, and what we learned and how we were comrades during the making of it. It was very different for us, you know. And we still collect and get together and make the records we do now, but there was just something I could never explain about that record. And that was what? Six records ago?”

Read the entire interview here.