On February 20, former QUEENSRŸCHE and current OPERATION: MINDCRIME frontman Geoff Tate took part in a "One On One" session at City Winery in New York City during his "The Whole Story 'Rÿche' Acoustic Tour". Professionally filmed video footage of the two-song performance ("Out Of Mind" and "Chasing Blue Sky") can be seen below (video by Ehud Lazin). Tate's current acoustic tour sees him performing songs from all 17 albums he has done throughout his illustrious 35-year career. Geoff is backed during the show by a seven-piece acoustic band of musicians from the United States and Ireland and features three guitar players, mandolin, cello, saxophone, violin and multiple percussion instruments to produce high-energy acoustic versions of some of the Tate's former band's most recognized songs, including "Silent Lucidity", "Jet City Woman", "Empire", "I Don't Believe In Love" and "Eyes Of A Stranger". Tate told Centre Daily Times about his acoustic tour: "I've done acoustic tours before, but nothing quite like this. This is a storytelling tour and I've got 35 years of music, touring and stories to accompany all of that. I thought that it would be kind of interesting to tell stories about the songs and what was going on at the time when they came out, either with me personally, with the band or what was going on in the news at the time and how they influenced the albums." According to Tate, stripping down songs involves so much more than just replacing the electric guitar with an acoustic. "An acoustic presentation goes back to the roots of the song," he explained. "Every song I've ever written has either started on an acoustic guitar or a piano and with this tour, I am just reverse engineering the song back to where it started. I think that a song is a song, and you can take just about any song and reformat it with different instrumentation. As long as you have a vocalist, it's going to be identifiable to the audience. "It's been really fun reworking the music to fit acoustically," he continued. "You have to approach it differently and figure out what the song's strength is. Is it the melody? The rhythm? And then, how do you showcase those things? It really is a different way of thinking and presenting the music." "Resurrection", the second album from OPERATION: MINDCRIME, was released last September via Frontiers Music Srl. The album is the second part of Tate's musical trilogy.
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