In a new interview with Northwest Music Scene, former Queensrÿche frontman discusses the 30th Anniversary of the band's iconic Operation: Mindcrime album, the writing and recording process, what it means to perform it now three decades later with his own band (Operation: Mindcrime), and his daughter Emily stepping into the role of Sister Mary.

Geoff Tate: "I grew up listening to, I guess what we would call “progressive rock” music now, bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes. Bands that made 'story' albums really stood out for me. I sort of envisioned doing something like that when Queensryche got together. If you look at our first two albums, you can see that we were really experimenting with semantic writing rather than individual song ideas. The albums sort of took on a theme. So, we were already kind of moving in that direction. We just didn’t have a full concept story.

That finally happened after the Rage for Order tour. I stayed back in Montreal with some friends and was living there and frequenting a drinking establishment that was also a local for a group of people who, unbeknownst to me at the time, were involved in some pretty heavy – how can I describe it – they were into kidnapping, extortion, bank robbery (laughs). They were a group that was trying to take the province of Quebec back out of the union of Canada. They were a political group, and they were some pretty bad people. I didn’t know any of this at the time because the people I was hanging out with knew these people and it was a 'friends of friends' kind of thing. Some of these characters in the bar became, I guess, characterizations of the story I was working on at the time, which became Operation: Mindcrime.

I found that the situation I was involved in at the time really became sort of the back story of the story I was working on, which was kind of interesting how that all happened. One night, after eating at the bar, I was on my way home and needed to stop at the corner grocery store, and when I did, I noticed there was a Catholic church across the street that had its doors open and all this beautiful music was coming out of the church. Being curious, I walked over and went in. A choir was just finishing their nightly rehearsal. It was snowing outside; wintertime and all this steam was coming out of the church, and there were candles lit everywhere. So, I’m sitting down in one of the benches there, just kind of checking out the whole atmosphere, and I swear, like a hammer to the side of the head, the whole story that I’d been toying with for weeks just cemented in my head. I grabbed my notebook, and I started writing. I didn’t stop writing for, like, a week.

I finished the whole story outline, started working on the music and writing some songs for the album I was doing in my head, and by springtime, March, our guitar player Michael (Wilton) was getting married, so I flew home to be in the wedding. At the bachelor party, I sprung this idea to the rest of the band about Operation: Mindcrime as a story, a concept, saying 'these are the characters and here’s some of the music I’ve written already, and what do you think?'  They all loved the idea so after Michael’s honeymoon we all began earnestly adding to the record and working on it, and by the end of the year, we had it finished and were getting ready to release it. It was one of those kinds of projects that started snowballing. It started rolling and rolling and rolling, and pretty soon, it was bigger than all of us."

Read the complete interview here.