QUEENSRŸCHE singer Todd La Torre recently spoke with BigMusicGeek.com and the subject of some fans continuing to be reluctant to embrace him as a full-fledged member of the band came up.
“I still get [resistance from some of them],” he admitted. “People are, like, ‘This guy’s a hack’, ‘He sings like a dead cat’, ‘He screams’, ‘He doesn’t sing and he has no control’, ‘He has zero stage presence’, ‘Geoff is the only voice at QUEENSRŸCHE’. But you know what? There are also a lot of people that were, like, ‘Damn, he hits those high notes,’ ‘Wow, they’re not downtuning,’ ‘Man, I haven’t heard ‘Child Of Fire’ in forever,’ and ‘They’re playing ‘The Warning’ and all of these other deep cuts like ‘Roads To Madness’ in their entirety instead of just doing a medley.’ A lot of people were positive about it, but as a fan, if you take the emotion out of the equation and just look at the records, you might say I was a huge QUEENSRŸCHE fan, but after ‘Empire’, I didn’t have any interest anymore. I wasn’t hearing the vocals I wanted and I wasn’t hearing the cool music that I loved them to have.”
He continued: “I think there were a lot of fans who jumped ship [toward the end of Geoff’s tenure with QUEENSRŸCHE]. When I got into the fold, it was, like, ‘Hey guys, show me all the music you’ve got. I’m never going to tell you anything’s too heavy. We’re not going to go in an adult contemporary direction, so let’s get back to what QUEENSRŸCHE is known and loved for.’ I was, like, ‘Let me tell you what I love about this band and let me tell you why I quit listening to your band and this is what your audience loves.’ With me, they no longer had any restraints placed on them, so they were sending me song ideas for new material that were totally killer. I was, like, ‘Did you just make this up?’ and they’d be, like, ‘Oh, no. This was stored on a hard drive. I showed this to our old singer and he thought it was too heavy.’ And I’m, like, ‘Listen, man. Show me everything you have and I’m going to give it my all.”
He added: “I am not perfect, and as we all already know, Geoff sang brilliantly on the old records.”
It was noted that “it’s amazing how people react whenever an original member of their favorite group is forced to ‘move on,'” to which Todd replied: “But I think that it’s worked to my advantage as well as the band’s advantage. Most people are, like, ‘Hey, here’s a younger guy that can hit all the notes and that’s getting all the inflections. He’s a true fan of metal and this band and respects the legacy.'”
He continued: “We’re working on album number four [with me on vocals], but there are still people that hate me just because I’m not [Geoff]. They don’t see the band as anything else other than the original lineup. I’ve always said, ‘Yes, this lineup has fewer original members, but it’s putting out better music than the band did when it had more original members.’ Let’s get serious here. You know what? We’re loving it and we’re having a great time. We’re writing the new album and the stuff we have brewing right now is really awesome, ya know? I know you can’t please everybody, but I do feel as if there’s always been these targets on my back with some of the people.”
You can check out the entire interview at BigMusicGeek.com.