[Ihsahn] ”It’s a kind of no-win situation because if you repeat yourself, people will say you are repeating yourself. If you do something new, they complain about it not being the same thing they liked before. What I say is if you prefer that material, you always have those old albums. From my perspective it can be annoying to always be seen as my own little brother. Because I played in Emperor, everything I do will always be compared to Emperor.” - Ihsahn

[Pt II: Speak: Geoff Tate Recounts The Power Of TV, And Public Opinion, In Mindcrime’s Breakthrough] "All of a sudden we were kind of elevated in the public’s eye now as sort of this pop band, and these singles that were charting all over the place and we were doing award shows and everything was changing. We weren’t this experimental, sort of avant-garde band anymore to people’s eyes. And even ourselves. People were talking to us about creating action figure dolls and showing us prototypes, and we’re going, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute. This, this is stupid. This is ridiculous. This is not what Queensrÿche is about.'" - Geoff Tate

[Speak: Geoff Tate Recounts The Power Of TV, And Public Opinion, In Mindcrime’s Breakthrough] “As soon as that thing hit MTV, the week later, we sold 500,000 copies. It just went through the roof, and it really showed us how powerful that television medium is. People, especially in this country, are just glued to the television, and they buy what’s sold to them. So here, you can work your butt off a number of different ways and play your songs and affect a very small amount of people with that, but when it’s packaged as a product and sold as a commercial, all of a sudden, everybody’s interested." - Geoff Tate

[Suidakra] "When we started, there were a lot of people that told us, 'Hey man, what are you doing? That combination won’t work.' Now there is this huge movement in Europe with all of this folk metal stuff. I think there are going to be a lot of bands that won’t survive this stuff because there are now many bands who think they can get very famous playing Viking metal, but I’m ok with it – I’m just a musician and I’ve been doing it for years and I want to play the music I love." - Arkadius

[Ensiferum] "Thirteen years ago, Markus Toivonen formed Ensiferum. His group expanded on the folk elements displayed by Amorphis and the melodic death/thrash of his southern neighbors in Gothenburg, Sweden. What he helped create was something revolutionary, not only for Ensiferum’s greater use of folk music, but for the group helping pave the path for the speed metal style that we have come to associate with Finnish bands such as Children of Bodom, Kalmah and Norther..."

[Hatchet] "The music industry today seems to be just about finding 'The next big thing'[and] people looking for what they can cash in on to make a short-term profit. So in result, you have a bunch of throwaway garbage that pollutes the market. Once they use it up for all its resources it’s on to the next trend. It seems to me that a lot of the bands out there are just trying to sell themselves purely on the image, or a 'Retro' fashion. Since what they are trying to copy has already been done a million times over, it doesn’t hold much substance." - Marcus Kirchen

[Suite Sister Mary: With Just One Song, Pamela Moore Creates An Iconic Character] "They were very, very, and have always been, very professional. That’s something I really liked about with [them], I like working with those guys. It’s not all about, you know, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. They have families now, but even before, it was always just, just really well-behaved. [laughs] . . . that’s one thing I really like, ’cause I didn’t want to be the typical rock chick that’s in this band that’s partying every night. It really isn’t that way. They handle it very well and very professionally." - Pamela Moore

[Mourning Beloveth] "An organic gut reaction that music renders in your mind and body was the barometer against which we guided ourselves and our own gut instincts. That, to me is the only way to write music, keep it simple because if other considerations, like worrying about how people will like it, is it 'cool' enough, fashionable enough for mags etc., the actual music becomes less of a priority so much so that it fools nobody; the insincerity of the music becomes apparent to everybody." - Brendan

[Pharaoh] "When we released The Longest Night we thought we were pretty badass that we had put out an excellent album, but it wasn’t long before I was thinking about how we could top it. With precious few exceptions, every band eventually follows an excellent release with a not-so-excellent release, and as a writer, I’m very aware of this fact and I worry that I’ve crossed that line. But even before we started recording Be Gone, I knew that we were set to outdo ourselves." - Matt Johnsen

[Anarchy-X: Scott Rockenfield Discusses The Drums Behind Mindcrime—And The Band’s Beloved Dungeon] "I think that’s one of the things that made the record so special, was our ability to just really be challenging ourselves at that point. And the excitement was high, and we had the Q Prime thing coming into play for us with the management taking over and helping us go to the next level and our business situation in that respect was just really getting’ cleaned up, so our excitement for that was that we didn’t have to worry about a lot of those things, or at least we were hoping we didn’t. And it just made us, I think, just perform better." - Scott Rockenfield

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