Details keep on surfacing about Geoff Tate’s upcoming “Operation: Mindcrime III” album

On May 3, the third and last installment of the band’s iconic “Operation: Mindcrime” album series will be released by former Queensrÿche singer Geoff Tate, as per Blabbermouth. On Friday, March 20, “Power“—the album’s lead single—will be released. Geoff wrote “Power” with his guitarist/producer Kieran Robertson. Tate sings, Rich Baur drums, Disturbed bassist and co-producer of “Operation: Mindcrime III” John Moyer plays the bass, Dario Parente and Amaury Altmayer play the guitar, and Tate and Robertson handle the synths and strings. Juan Urteaga mixed and mastered it at Trident Studios in Pacheco, California. Tate made this statement regarding “Power” in a recent interview with rock and roll comedian Dean Delray’s “Let There Be Talk” podcast.

It’s a cool track. ‘Power’ is the first — I don’t know — we call ’em singles nowadays. It’s the first release on the album. And, yeah, it’s a really cool song — very, very energetic, very up, and kind of says a lot in a very short time, which I like.

He also shares more about the writing process.

I think you use whatever sort of way you can in order to get what you want. And, for me, I sort of look at it as a story, and I write the story out first of what is happening, and then I kind of dissect it and create chapters, and those chapters turn into songs. And then I kind of work to link them all together and follow a storyline that makes sense. And then you gotta kind of factor in musically how you’re gonna tie it together. Does it make sense musically and melodically to put this song before this song, before this song, before this song? ‘Cause that’s a big thing too, is making it flow, so it doesn’t seem obtrusive and people don’t have to turn the page back to find out what happened, and they’re kind of following along in a chronological order.

Following Delray’s observation that “Power” “sounds like Queensrÿche” Geoff made this statement.

Yeah. Well, part of the whole writing process was keeping the music in the universe of ‘Mindcrime’, writing within that style, I guess you’d say.

Geoff responded to the question of how “Operation: Mindcrime III” was recorded.

There’s 13 songs on the record, and it was recorded all over the world. And the beauty of modern recording is that if you have the right equipment, the quality gear, we just take it with us wherever we go. And we set up in hotel rooms backstage at shows, venues. I think one track was recorded in a church. Just wherever we have the right kind of room for the sound, we can record there. We recorded one of the songs, parts of it, in this castle in Italy. Do you remember that character Casanova? Well, he was imprisoned in this castle way back when. And the place is just an amazing ruin, of course, but it had this one room that was just incredible. It [had] big, high ceilings, open environment, big stone walls and that kind of thing. But it added a really unique sound to the song. So anyway, we just kind of took advantage of that wherever we could and wrote the album as we were touring around the world, really. And I wrote music for the album and lyrics for the album. And Kieran Robertson, my writing partner for this project, contributed so much to this record, playing guitar and also writing music and lyrics too.