QUEENSRŸCHE Singer Responds To 'GEOFF TATE Copycat' Accusations

QUEENSRŸCHE singer Todd La Torre was interviewed on a recent installment of HATEBREED frontman Jamey Jasta's official podcast, "The Jasta Show". You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below.

Speaking about the comparisons to QUEENSRŸCHE's original frontman Geoff Tate, Todd said: "I'm a pretty good chameleon. I mean, I'm really good at listening to a singer and going, 'Okay, what is it that's making their tone that way? How are they…?' All the little nuances, you know. And I'm really good at kind of picking that apart and emulating that. But anatomically and physically, you're just not gonna be that guy. I'm never gonna sound like Steve Perry. I don't care how much I try to sing a song [from] JOURNEY. I don't have his anatomy, his sinuses, his structure and his face is different, his throat… everything's different. So when people talk about the QUEENSRŸCHE thing, 'Oh, he's a copycat.' It's, like, 'Wait a minute.' There are people that can sing all the notes probably better than me, okay? Technically, they can sing the notes great. But tonally, there are people that are just never gonna have that tonal similarity."

He continued: "I always like to say, if you're a guitarist, and you are an Yngwie Malmsteen fanatic and you're learning all the way that he plays and the neoclassical and all this harmonic minor… all the stuff that he does. Or Eddie Van Halen… or these influences as you're learning. 'Cause you're trying this. 'Okay, I wanna learn how to play this song.' And you learn it lick for lick, you try to copy the bending right, the attack… everything the same, because you wanna play it like how it goes. When you do that over so many years, and it's starting to shape who you are… So finally, when you've got a rhythm track and you say, 'Okay, I wanna noodle over this,' you're probably gonna bend into a note the way that you've been shaped. And then you say, 'You know, I like this. I'm gonna phrase it this way or do a bar trick, do some Steve Vai thing here.' So you kind of take all these different influences and that's what…

"'Cause people say, 'What's Todd's voice?' I have a bunch of voices. You know, it's all me — whether it's the high, gritty kind of 'Painkiller' JUDAS PRIEST kind of evil metal. I don't like to do the super-clean, high stuff all the time; I want edge on it, and I want it to sound evil. And there's a lot of brutal stuff, dude, that I don't do in the band, 'cause the music doesn't… QUEENSRŸCHE isn't about that, and I know that, and I respect it. But that's everything about QUEENSRŸCHE I love."

QUEENSRŸCHE hired La Torre to replace Tate in 2012 and has released two albums with the ex-CRIMSON GLORY frontman: 2013's "Queensrÿche" and 2015's "Condition Hüman".

"Condition Hüman" debuted at No. 27 on The Billboard 200 chart, having shifted 14,000 equivalent album units in the week ending October 8, 2015.