IN: Troyal Garth Brooks (born February 7, 1962) is an American singer and songwriter. His integration of rock and roll elements into the country genre has earned him immense popularity in the United States. Brooks has had great success on the country single and album charts, with multi-platinum recordings and record-breaking live performances, while also crossing over into the mainstream pop arena. According to the RIAA, he is the best-selling solo albums artist in the United States with 148 million domestic units sold, ahead of Elvis Presley, and is second only to the Beatles in total album sales overall.

Brooks' third album, Ropin' the Wind, was released in September 1991. It had advance orders of 4 million copies and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1, a first for a country artist. The album's musical content was a melange of pop country and honky tonk; singles included "The River", "What She's Doing Now", and a cover of Billy Joel's "Shameless". It would become Brooks' second-best selling album, after No Fences. The success of Ropin' the Wind further propelled the sales of Brooks' first two albums, enabling Brooks to become the first country artist with three albums listed in the Billboard 200's top 20 in one week.  After spending time in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, Brooks co-wrote a gospel-country-rock hybrid single, "We Shall Be Free", to express his desire for tolerance. The song became the first single off his fourth album The Chase. The album only reached No. 12 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, Brooks' first song in three years to fail to make the top 10. Nonetheless, "We Shall Be Free" peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard Christian Songs charts through a marketing deal with Rick Hendrix Company, and earned Brooks a 1993 GLAAD Media Award. The next single released from The Chase was "Somewhere Other Than the Night", followed by "Learning to Live Again", which peaked at numbers one and two on the Hot Country Songs chart, respectively. The album's final single, "That Summer", would go on to be the most successful single from the album, reaching No. 1 in July 1993.  Brooks released his first Christmas album, "Beyond the Season" on August 25, 1992. The album included classics such as "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" as well as an original tune "The Old Man's Back in Town." "Beyond the Season" was the best selling Christmas album in 1992, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart.
QUESTION: Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
IN: Geoff Tate (born Jeffrey Wayne Tate, January 14, 1959; he later changed his first name to Geoffery or Geoffrey) is a German-born American singer and musician. He rose to fame with the progressive metal band Queensryche, who had commercial success with their 1988 album Operation: Mindcrime and 1990 album Empire. Tate is ranked fourteenth on Hit Parader's list of the 100 Greatest Metal Vocalists of All Time.

Since 2012, Geoff Tate has attracted some controversy, mostly in part to the circumstances surrounding the split with Queensryche (when his bandmates, guitarist Michael Wilton, bassist Eddie Jackson and drummer Scott Rockenfield fired him from the band and replaced him with then-Crimson Glory vocalist Todd La Torre).  Tate attracted negative attention for spitting on and physically assaulting Wilton and Rockenfield before and during a show in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on April 14, 2012. Then, during a later show the Rocklahoma Festival on May 26, Tate commented to an unresponsive crowd "You guys suck," which his bandmates, as well as some fans, felt was an insult, but Tate would later defend his actions by stating in a court declaration "I was not insulting the audience. I was trying to motivate or excite them." He finds that this was used against him in the lawsuit: "It's just something that the other guys [in the band] and their team of people are trying to twist into a 'Geoff doesn't respect the fans' type of thing." He elaborated on that in an interview, saying: "I say that stuff all the time, you know. It's part of being a front man, you know. You got to motivate the audience, you know. And I say things to get people motivated. I think... I say things to push people's buttons to get them to react. It's part of a performance. But if you're in a lawsuit, of course, these things get taken out of context and put into a new format. I guess the objective is to make me look like I don't care about the fans. Which is unfortunate."  During the "Operation: Mindcrime Anniversary Tour" tour, ten minutes into a show in St. Charles, Illinois on May 17, 2013, Tate grabbed an audience member's smartphone, turned around, and threw it over his shoulder into the crowd.On the subject, Tate commented: "Some actions that I have become very normal with as a performer are getting scrutinized and manipulated to paint a picture of me [to make me look like a bad guy]." He accused the uploader of the video showing this footage to have manipulated the footage to make it appear as though he threw it, as he insists that he accidentally dropped it while trying to take pictures of the fan and of himself.  Tate has commented on these controversies in relation to the Queensryche lawsuits, saying: "I guess that's the nature of being in a lawsuit. Now you have to watch what you say, and trust that who you are talking to does the right thing, you know, and push the information out in the way that it happened. And not try to construct something different, you know?"
QUESTION:
What happened that made them split?