Unafraid

“Unafraid” is an interesting song, it’s different. We wanted to let the words of the soldiers speak on their own, so we used their interviews as the lyrics, and all the verses are the soldiers talking back and forth. It is two soldiers talking about different time frames — one Vietnam and the other Kosovo — and you’d think they were talking about the same conflict, because they were saying the same things. Musically, it’s a pretty adventurous track, it’s very different from anything Queensrÿche has ever done before. Not only do we have other people doing the verses, but they’re not even singing — they’re speaking. We had elements of the music beforehand, riffs and pieces, and then we constructed the music around the verses. If you listen, the guitar in the verses is in mono, not stereo, so you have room to hear what they’re saying. On the chorus, the music goes to stereo again. There’s a lot of that going on with the record, which is what makes it so effective with headphones. You really get that experience of things moving, shifting and changing in your head. It’s a very interesting way to experience it. There’s the line, “You do what you know you have to do, somebody has to stand in the gap…” After you experience war and that hand-to-hand combat, you are unafraid, because you just experienced and imagined hell, and lived. What do you have to be afraid of? “I fear nothing, I am unafraid…” As per Geoff Tate on queensryche.com