Chris DeGarmo

Chris DeGarmo — born in the United States on 14 June 1963 — was Queensrÿche's guitarist and principal songwriter between 1982 and 1997, and the author of the song that took the band to a wide audience. He wrote "Silent Lucidity", the track from Empire (1990) built on acoustic guitar and orchestral arrangement, which reached the American top 10 and earned Grammy nominations — a result practically unthinkable for a progressive metal band. He was nominated three times for the award as a songwriter. His contribution, however, is larger than one isolated hit. DeGarmo wrote much of the material of the classic phase, including Operation: Mindcrime (1988), and it is he who establishes the band's writing logic: open harmonies, progressions that do not follow the heavy metal template and deliberate room for Geoff Tate's voice to occupy. His guitar works more as arrangement than as riff. He left in 1997, without public explanation, shortly after the Hear in the Now Frontier tour. The departure was only made known months later. What he did next is the most cited part of his story: he gave up professional music and went to work as a charter aviation pilot. He returned to composing occasionally in the following decades, most recently in a project alongside his daughter.