“Although I would like our world to change
It helps me to appreciate
Those nights and those dreams
But, my friend, I’d sacrifice all those nights
If I could make the Earth and my dreams the same
The only difference is
To let love replace all our hate”
Creed – Higher
There are bands I discovered, bands I grew into, and bands that have been around long enough that their music became attached to different versions of my life. Creed falls pretty comfortably into that last category for me, although the longer I thought about writing something centered around them, the more I realized there was no way I could write only about Creed. Not anymore. Their history has become too tangled up in everything that came from it, and I think that’s what makes the story so much more interesting this many years later.
Creed is Scott Stapp‘s story and Mark Tremonti‘s story, but it’s just as much Brian Marshall and Scott “Flip” Phillips‘ story, even if those two names don’t always end up at the center of the conversation. Eventually, in a way nobody could have predicted when this all started, Myles Kennedy becomes part of it too.
From there you get Alter Bridge and Scott‘s solo career, while Mark eventually discovers he still has music that doesn’t completely belong in either band. That becomes Tremonti, the band that gives the heavier side of his writing somewhere else to go, this time with Mark himself behind the microphone. Myles builds another enormous musical partnership with Slash, then starts making records under his own name because, apparently, Alter Bridge and Slash aren’t enough to contain everything inside him, either. Then, because this entire family tree apparently wasn’t complicated enough already, Mark steps completely outside what anyone expected from him and records Frank Sinatra songs with musicians who had actually played with Sinatra.
After all of that, somehow you get Creed again. I’ve been fortunate enough to see quite a bit of this story happen in front of me. I saw Creed for the first time on August 10, 2002. I saw Scott Stapp on his own on March 11, 2006. I saw Alter Bridge on November 7, 2007, and again on August 9, 2008. Then Creed came back, and I saw them on September 1, 2009, and August 15, 2010.
I wasn’t intentionally following some musical family tree around. I was going to concerts. I loved Creed, so I went to see Creed. When Scott went solo, I wanted to see Scott. When Alter Bridge came along, I loved what they were doing too, so I went to see them. When Creed came back, of course I went back.
Written out all these years later, though, those dates look different because I managed to catch several completely different chapters of the same story without realizing I was watching chapters at all. That’s the strange thing about living through music instead of discovering all of it afterward. You don’t know which moments are going to matter twenty years later. You don’t know that the band you’re seeing might not exist two years from now, or that a singer from another band sharing stages with them might eventually become the frontman of something new with three of those same musicians. You’re simply there because you love the music, and enough time passes that eventually you can see connections that weren’t visible when you were living through them.
For Creed, that means going all the way back to Florida and to four people who couldn’t possibly have known how complicated the thing they were creating would eventually become.
MY OWN PRISON 🧱
Before “Higher,” before “With Arms Wide Open,” before the arenas and the millions of records sold, and definitely before liking Creed apparently became something people were supposed to apologize for, there was Scott Stapp and Mark Tremonti. Scott “Flip” Phillips and Brian Marshall eventually completed the lineup that became Creed, and in 1997 they released My Own Prison.
Listening to that album now means trying to temporarily forget almost thirty years of everything we know came afterward, which is harder than it sounds because Creed became so culturally attached to what happened next. We know Human Clay. We know Weathered. We know how enormous “Higher” and “With Arms Wide Open” became. We know about the breakup, Alter Bridge, Scott‘s solo career, Full Circle, the second separation, the decade when Creed seemed finished for good, and now the Summer of ’99 era and an entirely new generation discovering songs like “One Last Breath.”
All that history changes how we hear the beginning, because we already know where the road eventually leads. Take it away, though, and My Own Prison is a remarkably dark place to begin.
There is faith running through the record, but I’ve never thought Creed was nearly as spiritually simple as people sometimes make them out to be. Scott wasn’t writing from the perspective of someone who had belief completely figured out. He was wrestling with guilt, judgment, anger, isolation, redemption, and his relationship with faith itself, and often several of those things were happening inside the same song.
The title track establishes that immediately. “Torn” carries its own internal conflict, while “What’s This Life For” asks exactly the kind of question its title suggests. Even when the record reaches for something beyond the darkness surrounding it, the answers never feel particularly easy.
That tension became one of the things that made Creed work. Scott could take something deeply internal and make it sound enormous, while Mark seemed to understand exactly how to build the music underneath him so the emotional scale matched the words. Brian and Flip gave both of them the foundation they needed, and I think it’s easy to undersell what that means because bass and drums rarely get discussed with the same mythology we attach to singers and guitarists.
Brian’s bass wasn’t there to compete with Mark. It gave Mark’s guitar somewhere to go, while Flip’s drumming could sit underneath the quieter moments without making them feel empty, and then become enormous when Creed opened up into one of those choruses that eventually became part of the band’s signature. The four of them weren’t simply Scott and Mark with a rhythm section behind them. Brian and Flip were part of why Scott and Mark could sound the way they did in the first place.
The partnership between Scott and Mark is still impossible to ignore when you listen to My Own Prison knowing what both eventually did separately. They’ve spent decades proving they don’t need each other to make good music, but none of that changes the fact that when Scott’s voice sits on top of Mark’s writing, something happens that neither man has ever completely recreated elsewhere.
That’s not a criticism of everything that followed. If anything, the next thirty years would prove how much more music existed inside all four of them. It simply means Creed sounds like Creed because of what those particular people made together, and in 1997, nobody knew how difficult it would eventually become to keep those people together.
That distinction matters more to me the longer this story gets. Chemistry doesn’t mean two people are destined to remain together forever, and making extraordinary music together doesn’t automatically make the relationship around that music sustainable. Scott and Mark were eventually going to prove both sides of that in ways nobody listening to My Own Prison could have known yet. The music worked. Keeping everything around the music working was going to be much harder.
Then Human Clay happened, and everything around Creed became much bigger.
HUMAN CLAY 📀
There are successful albums, and then there are albums that become inseparable from an era. Human Clay belongs in that second category because by the time Creed finished touring behind it, they weren’t simply another successful rock band anymore. They were one of the bands defining what mainstream rock sounded like around the turn of the millennium.
“Higher” is probably the easiest place to start because the song has become so attached to Creed that it’s easy to forget just how enormous it must have felt before everybody had heard it a thousand times. Mark’s opening guitar part is recognizable almost immediately; Scott enters underneath it, and the entire song keeps expanding until it reaches a chorus that feels like it was built specifically for spaces much larger than whatever room you’re listening to it in.
Creed had already shown on My Own Prison that they could make intimate struggles feel huge. On Human Clay, they learned how to make huge feel almost limitless, and part of that scale came from what Brian and Flip were doing underneath the obvious parts. Brian could give the songs weight without crowding Mark’s guitar, while Flip understood how to let a song build instead of playing every section as though it had already reached the chorus.
That’s a skill that becomes almost invisible when somebody does it well because you notice the giant payoff without necessarily noticing how much of the reason it feels giant is that the band didn’t spend the entire song trying to sound that way.
The album had more range than the version of Creed that eventually became a punchline in some corners of popular culture would suggest. “What If” was heavier and angrier, carrying an aggression that didn’t fit particularly neatly beside the softer image some people eventually attached to the band. “Faceless Man” dug deeply into the spiritual questions Scott kept returning to, while “Beautiful” had its own darkness and “Are You Ready?” sounded like a band beginning to understand exactly how much confidence it could carry into a song without collapsing underneath it.
Then there was “With Arms Wide Open.” For a band that spent so much time wrestling with guilt, faith, and internal conflict, one of Creed‘s defining songs came from Scott confronting something completely different: becoming a father.
That’s part of why the song has always worked for me. The vulnerability doesn’t come from despair. It comes from realizing that another person’s life is suddenly going to depend on what you do with yours, wanting desperately to give them something better while simultaneously knowing you don’t have all the answers yourself. There is fear in that, but it has almost nothing in common with the fear living inside My Own Prison. It’s responsibility arriving before you feel completely prepared for it, and that’s probably why the song means something different to me now than it did when I first heard it.
Creed had always been good at taking Scott’s internal conversations and making them universal enough that someone else could find themselves in them. “With Arms Wide Open” may have been the clearest example yet, and it also became absolutely massive.
That success matters to everything that happens next because there is a point where success stops simply making life easier and starts magnifying everything already happening underneath it. The tours become bigger, expectations get higher, everybody wants another record capable of doing what the last one did, and suddenly four people who started making music together are suddenly responsible for a machine larger than any of them.
Brian Marshall left Creed in 2000, and that’s one of the first major breaks in this story that becomes more interesting once you know where everybody eventually ends up. Brian wasn’t simply a bass player who disappeared from the band and got replaced. His absence changed Creed‘s internal shape. By the time they began working on Weathered, the four people who had created My Own Prison and Human Clay were no longer all in the room.
Creed somehow got even bigger anyway. That’s one of the strange things about looking at a band from the outside. Commercial momentum can make everything appear healthy because sales, radio play, and sold-out shows are visible while the relationships underneath them usually aren’t. A band can be standing on the largest stage of its career while the structure holding it together is already under more pressure than anybody in the audience can see. Knowing what comes next makes Weathered feel like both a triumph and a warning, even though I certainly wasn’t hearing it that way at the time.
WEATHERED
Mark handled bass on Weathered in addition to guitar, leaving Creed as Scott Stapp, Mark Tremonti, and Scott Phillips for the album. On paper, losing one quarter of the original band should have made Creed sound smaller. Nothing about Weathered sounds small, but there is something missing beneath its size that becomes easier to hear once you know what was happening around the band.
Brian’s absence matters precisely because Mark could cover the bass parts but couldn’t replace the relationship. Playing another instrument on a recording isn’t the same thing as having another musician in the room whose instincts have developed beside yours. Creed could make Weathered without Brian, and obviously they made an enormously successful record without him, but the band itself was different.
Flip becomes even more important when I listen to that configuration because he’s the person sitting between Scott’s voice and everything Mark was responsible for instrumentally. When “My Sacrifice” builds into its chorus, Flip helps determine exactly when the song lifts and how much weight lands underneath it. When “Bullets” pushes into a much more aggressive place, he has to meet Mark there without making it sound like Creed suddenly became a completely different band. When “One Last Breath” keeps hovering near the edge, the drums have to serve the tension rather than overwhelm it.
That’s what I mean when I call Flip connective tissue in this story. He isn’t usually the person whose name dominates the headline, but take him out and the entire musical shape changes.
“My Sacrifice” became another enormous Creed anthem, carrying enough of what people already loved about the band to sit comfortably beside “Higher” and “With Arms Wide Open.” At the same time, “Bullets” pushed much harder into the heavier side of Creed and remains one of those songs worth pointing toward whenever somebody tries to reduce the band to a collection of giant radio ballads. “Don’t Stop Dancing” reached toward hope without pretending the darkness surrounding the record had suddenly disappeared just because the song was looking for light.
The title track might be the one that fits this period best because “Weathered“ is exactly what Creed sounded like by then. Not finished and not completely broken, but carrying the wear of everything that had happened around them. There is exhaustion inside that album, but there is defiance too. The band still sounded capable of taking on the world even as some of the things happening underneath it were becoming increasingly difficult to hold together.
Then there’s “One Last Breath,” which has somehow managed to become both one of Creed‘s defining songs and, years later, one of the songs that helped introduce the band to another generation. I’ve heard it more times than I could possibly count, but what keeps it from becoming background noise for me is how close to the edge the whole thing feels. The song isn’t written from a place of safety after the danger has passed. It lives in the moment when someone is frighteningly close to falling but hasn’t fallen yet, with enough hope left to reach back. That small distance between giving up and holding on is where the entire song lives.
On August 10, 2002, I saw Creed live for the first time. I couldn’t have known I was seeing them near the end of their first life as a band, and I think that’s why the date has become more meaningful to me as the years have passed. We remember concerts with information we didn’t have while we were actually standing there.
I wasn’t watching Creed in 2002, wondering whether Scott and Mark would still be making music together two years later. I wasn’t wondering what Mark would sound like with another singer because Alter Bridge didn’t exist. Scott didn’t have a solo career yet, and Brian’s eventual return to make music with Mark and Flip would have meant nothing to me, because there was no way to know where any of them were going.
I was watching Creed, and at that moment that was enough. Within two years, it wouldn’t be an option anymore.
THE FIRST ENDING ‼️
There is an easy way to tell the story of Creed‘s first breakup. The band became enormously successful; relationships deteriorated; Scott’s personal struggles grew increasingly visible; things became dysfunctional; and Creed officially ended in 2004.
There was something strangely appropriate about Creed: Greatest Hits arriving later that same year. By November, the first chapter of Creed was already being packaged into a greatest-hits collection while Mark, Brian, and Flip were a few months into releasing new music with Myles as Alter Bridge. One band’s history was being collected while another one was just beginning.
None of that is wrong, but after everything that happened later, I don’t think the breakup itself is the most interesting part of this story anymore. What interests me more is what happened when the people responsible for Creed suddenly couldn’t use Creed as the place for their music.
Scott still had his voice and the same instinct to write his way through whatever was happening inside him. Mark still had more riffs and melodies than one band was ever going to contain. Flip still wanted to play, and Brian had already been outside Creed long enough to know what it felt like when the band continued without him.
Brian finding his way back to Mark and Flip is one of the pieces of the Alter Bridge story that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Before Myles could transform what the three of them were building, Mark, Brian, and Flip had to become a musical unit again themselves. Brian had already left Creed years before the band officially ended, so putting those three people back in a room wasn’t simply everybody except Scott continuing where they had left off. There was already history there that needed to be worked through before they could figure out whether they still had something worth building together.
Creed becoming unavailable didn’t mean any of them stopped being musicians. Instead, the breakup created several questions nobody had needed to answer before. Scott had to find out what Scott Stapp sounded like when the music underneath him wasn’t being written by Mark. For Mark, the question was where all of his writing went without Scott there to sing it. Brian and Flip had their own question to work through: whether the rhythm section they had built inside Creed could become something new rather than simply recreating what they’d already done.
The answers produced completely different roads, but I think it’s important not to treat those roads as consolation prizes for losing Creed. They may have started because Creed was no longer available, but eventually they became places these musicians actively chose to keep returning to. That difference is enormous. Alter Bridge would no longer be the answer to what Mark, Brian, and Flip did after Creed. Scott’s solo career would no longer be the answer to what Scott did without Mark. Years later, Tremonti would add another branch that wasn’t replacing anything at all. What began as necessity gradually became identity.
The strange part is that the person who would help turn one of those roads into Alter Bridge had already crossed Creed‘s path years earlier.
THE MAYFIELD FOUR 4️⃣
Myles Kennedy doesn’t actually enter this story when Alter Bridge forms in 2004. You have to go backward several years to The Mayfield Four.
The Mayfield Four released Fallout in 1998, and even this early version of Myles is interesting when you know where his voice eventually goes. There is more soul running through that record than what most people probably associate with Alter Bridge, and that’s one of the things I like about going backward through somebody’s catalog after you’ve known the later version for years. You can hear pieces that make perfect sense in hindsight without Fallout sounding like some primitive version of Alter Bridge waiting for Mark Tremonti to show up. It wasn’t. Myles already had his own musical history, influences, and instincts before his life ever became tangled up with Mark, Brian, and Flip.
The Mayfield Four then spent an enormous amount of time on the road trying to turn Fallout into something bigger.
There’s something almost ridiculous about viewing those shows from where we are now. Creed was on its way toward becoming one of the biggest rock bands in the world while The Mayfield Four was doing what opening bands do, trying to win over somebody else’s crowd and then moving on to the next city. During all of that, Mark heard enough of Myles for the voice to stay somewhere in his memory. Nobody exchanged some dramatic promise that they’d make a band together one day. There wasn’t a plan. Myles was simply good enough that years later, when Mark suddenly needed a singer and started thinking about voices he’d encountered before, he remembered him.
Before any of that could matter, The Mayfield Four still had another record to make. Second Skin arrived in 2001, and if Fallout sounds like a band discovering what it could be, Second Skin sounds much closer to a band that already knew.
Songs like “Sick and Wrong,” “Eden (Turn the Page),” “Mars Hotel,” “Summergirl,” and “White Flag” also show how much writing Myles had already done before One Day Remains. Second Skin could get darker and more uncomfortable than the first Alter Bridge record eventually would, touching relationships, addiction, damage, perseverance, and all the messy places where those things overlap. That’s important later because once Myles begins taking a larger lyrical role in Alter Bridge, particularly by the time we reach Blackbird and then AB III, those darker instincts don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. There was already a songwriter here who was willing to sit with things that didn’t have particularly clean answers.
I think Second Skin also gives us an early look at something Myles would keep doing throughout his career: changing depending on who was around him without becoming unrecognizable. The voice is unmistakable, but the music beneath it changes how he uses it. That’s going to matter a lot once we get to Alter Bridge, Slash, and eventually his solo records.
The frustrating part for The Mayfield Four is that being good enough doesn’t guarantee anyone will notice at the right time. They had a major-label deal, they toured relentlessly, and they made two records that gave Myles plenty of room to prove he could carry songs that were emotionally and vocally demanding.
If everything stopped there, they could easily have become one of those bands people discover years later because they start digging backward through the career of somebody who eventually became much more famous. There are plenty of musicians with a band like that somewhere in their history, the one that almost worked, probably deserved a little more attention than it got, and eventually became trivia attached to whatever happened afterward.
Except The Mayfield Four didn’t completely disappear from this story because Mark remembered Myles.
That matters more to me after spending time with these records because it makes Alter Bridge feel less like the random assembly of musicians that sometimes follows a major band’s breakup. Mark didn’t simply need a singer. He remembered a singer he’d already heard years earlier.
Years later, when Creed was gone, and Mark, Brian, and Flip needed to figure out what came next, that old connection suddenly became useful. The singer from the opening band was still out there.
Only this time, Mark wasn’t looking for somebody to open the show.
He was looking for somebody to help build the next one.
ONE DAY REMAINS 1️⃣
Alter Bridge could have become a footnote to Creed‘s history. That sounds ridiculous now, but it wouldn’t have sounded ridiculous at all in 2004. Mark, Brian, and Flip were three-quarters of Creed‘s original lineup; Creed had only officially ended that year, and whatever they did next would always be heard through that history, whether they wanted it to be or not. The easiest possible move would have been finding someone who occupied roughly the same vocal space as Scott, making something familiar enough that the existing audience would immediately understand it, and hoping that enough people would follow them into whatever came next.
Bringing in Myles made that almost impossible from the beginning because his voice was never going to let Alter Bridge become Creed with a different guy standing at the microphone.
A lot of that makes sense when you look at how One Day Remains came together. Mark had already written most of the music before Myles was brought into the picture, while Myles contributed lyrically to parts of the record and gave those songs a voice that immediately set them apart from what Creed had been. He wasn’t playing guitar on the album yet, though, and the Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy writing partnership that would eventually become such a huge part of Alter Bridge hadn’t really been built. In a lot of ways, the record catches Mark, Brian, and Flip in the space between the band they had just lost and the band the four of them hadn’t completely discovered yet.
I don’t think that makes One Day Remains some unfinished Creed record that Myles happened to sing on, because listening to it that way sells everybody involved short. “Open Your Eyes,” “Broken Wings,” “Find the Real,” and especially “Metalingus” already contain pieces of a band moving in a different direction, and Myles is far too distinctive for his presence to simply disappear beneath Mark’s writing. What I hear instead is the transition itself. Mark, Brian, and Flip naturally carried some of Creed‘s musical DNA with them because they were the people who helped create it in the first place, while Myles was introducing another voice and another set of instincts before any of them had spent enough time together to know exactly where those differences could take them.
Brian and Flip are a big part of why that transition works for me. The same rhythm section that had played “My Own Prison,” “Higher,” and “With Arms Wide Open” was now underneath these songs, and they didn’t suddenly forget everything they’d learned simply because the name of the band changed. They brought that chemistry with them, but they also had to start responding to a singer who phrased things differently, a heavier side of Mark that had more room to come forward, and, eventually, a second guitarist who would completely change the space available within the songs. One Day Remains catches them near the beginning of that adjustment, which is part of why hearing Creed somewhere in its foundation doesn’t bother me. I think it makes the record more interesting.
It also makes the jump to Blackbird much more important than simply saying Alter Bridge got better at making Alter Bridge records. By then, Myles was writing and playing guitar much more deeply inside the band.
That’s why I don’t really want to erase the Creed resemblance from the way we talk about One Day Remains. I like that you can hear it. It preserves a part of this evolution that would disappear if Alter Bridge had somehow arrived completely formed on its first day. You can hear where Mark, Brian, and Flip had been, hear what Myles changed simply by being there, and then put on Blackbird three years later and hear how much happened once all four of them had enough time to figure each other out.
After One Day Remains, Alter Bridge never really sounds this close to Creed again.
THE GREAT DIVIDE 🔅
While Mark, Brian, and Flip were discovering what Alter Bridge could become with Myles, Scott was figuring out what his own name meant without Creed attached to it.
That became The Great Divide in 2005, and I think Scott had a particularly difficult job with this one because there was really no version of his first solo album that wasn’t going to be compared to Creed. His voice was simply too recognizable. You could change the musicians around him, put Scott Stapp on the front of the album instead of Creed, and give him the freedom to make choices he probably couldn’t have made with the other three guys in the room, but then he starts singing, and it’s still that voice. The one people already connected to “Higher,” “My Sacrifice,” “With Arms Wide Open,” and everything else Creed had become.
What I’ve always liked about The Great Divide is that Scott doesn’t seem particularly interested in running away from that either. He didn’t make his first solo album by pretending he had never been the singer in Creed.
The title track is probably the easiest place to hear that. “The Great Divide” has the kind of size I expected from Scott, but it doesn’t feel exactly like Creed because Mark isn’t there shaping everything underneath him. I think I probably understood that less when the album first came out than I do now. Scott’s voice was always the easiest thing to point to when somebody asked what made Creed sound like Creed, but take Mark out of the equation, and you quickly realize how much his guitar and songwriting helped build the space Scott’s voice lived in. Scott still sounds like Scott without him. The world around that voice just feels different.
You can hear him trying different things inside that space throughout the record. “Justify” has some harder edges to it, while “Surround Me” lets Scott do the enormous melodic thing he’s always been very good at. “Broken” pulls some of that size back and lets him sit closer to the vulnerability underneath everything, while “Fight Song” and “Hard Way” make it pretty clear his first move after Creed wasn’t going to be disappearing quietly into some stripped-down singer-songwriter record. There is still plenty here that makes sense coming from the guy who had just spent years fronting Creed, but without Mark, Brian, and Flip around him, Scott finally had room to discover which parts of that sound were actually his.
His voice has always sounded a little strange to me on parts of this album too. Not bad, and definitely not unrecognizable, just rougher and less polished in places than what we’d gotten used to hearing on the Creed records. I’ve heard that story for years too, that some of the vocals may have been demo takes that Scott never went back and replaced, and honestly, listening to parts of the album, I understand why it stuck. I’ve just never found enough behind it to say that’s actually what happened. What I can hear is the roughness, and all these years later I don’t really think it hurts the record for me. If anything, some of those edges have become part of what makes The Great Divide sound like The Great Divide.
The difficult part of listening to it now is that we know what was happening around Scott during this period and what was still to come. It’s really easy to hear a rough vocal or a darker lyric and start connecting dots because we already know where some of those dots eventually lead. I don’t really want to do that to the album. Scott didn’t walk into the studio knowing we’d be sitting here twenty years later, knowing so much more about his mental health, addiction, and how bad things were going to get before they got better. Not every lyric needs to become a warning sign just because we know what happened next.
More importantly, The Great Divide deserves to be more than the album Scott made while his life was falling apart.
There are some really good songs on it, and when I go back to it now, I hear somebody trying to answer a question that everybody coming out of Creed eventually had to answer in one form or another. How much of the thing they had just spent years building belonged to the band, and how much of it could they carry with them? Mark, Brian, and Flip were figuring that out together with Myles in Alter Bridge. Scott had to figure it out largely by himself, and his voice made the comparison almost impossible to escape.
I got to see that version of Scott on March 11, 2006, and that show sits in a much more interesting place in my memory now than it probably did at the time. I’d seen Creed in 2002 when Weathered was still current, and the idea that the band might eventually disappear for more than a decade would have sounded ridiculous. Four years later, Creed was gone, and I was watching Scott without Mark, Brian, or Flip. There was no reason for me to think I’d eventually see Creed again in 2009 and 2010, and definitely no reason to think I’d be sitting here in 2026 talking about a reunion that somehow became bigger than almost anybody expected.
At the time, Scott Stapp solo wasn’t some side trip we could comfortably place between two Creed eras because we didn’t know there was going to be another Creed era. This was what came next. I think that’s easy to forget now because we have the luxury of seeing the whole timeline laid out in front of us, but nobody living through it had that. Alter Bridge wasn’t killing time until Creed returned either. Everybody had moved on because, for all they knew, moving on was the only option they had.
That makes The Great Divide more important to Scott’s story than simply being his first solo record. He proved there was an audience willing to follow him outside Creed, and he proved the voice and writing style people associated with that band could survive in another musical setting.
For a while, it wasn’t. The years around The Great Divide became some of the hardest and most public of Scott’s life. Substance abuse and serious mental-health struggles didn’t begin with the album, and they certainly didn’t end when the tour did.
We know more about those years now than we did while they were happening, including the mental health issues Scott eventually got properly diagnosed and began addressing. That context matters to me, but I don’t think it gives us a nice clean explanation for everything either. Understanding why somebody was struggling doesn’t erase what happened during those years, especially for the people around them. Mark, Brian, and Flip had their own experiences with Scott during Creed‘s first run, and later during the Full Circle reunion, and those experiences don’t disappear because we eventually understand more about what Scott was dealing with.
I think that’s one of the harder parts of Scott’s story to hold together because understanding more about what he was dealing with doesn’t require pretending the damage around it wasn’t real. His mental health and addiction mattered. So did the experiences of the people who were living through those years beside him. Both things can be true without one canceling out the other, and eventually everybody involved was going to have to decide what they could do with a history none of them had the ability to change.
That’s also why The Great Divide sounds different to me now than it did when it was new. In 2005, it was Scott Stapp’s first album after Creed.
The Scott making The Great Divide hadn’t reached the other side of any of this yet. He was making music, trying to build a career with his own name on it and still carrying things he didn’t fully understand.
While Scott was trying to build whatever came after Creed on his side of things, Alter Bridge was about to make the record that finally answered that question on theirs.
BLACKBIRD 🐦⬛
By the time I saw Alter Bridge on November 7, 2007, Blackbird had been out for less than a month.
One Day Remains introduced Alter Bridge. Blackbird is where I think they completely became themselves.
Brian and Flip changed with them. That’s the part that becomes easy to overlook because the Mark and Myles guitar relationship is so obvious on Blackbird. Underneath those guitars was a rhythm section that had already played together through Creed, separated, reunited, and was now developing a second musical identity together.
Brian could become more aggressive when the song needed it without losing the sense of space that had always made him effective, while Flip had more complicated material to navigate without ever turning complexity into clutter.
“Ties That Bind” and “Come to Life” pushed hard into the heavier side of the band without losing the melodic identity that had already developed on One Day Remains. “Watch Over You” went almost completely the other direction and showed how much emotional space Myles could occupy when everything around him pulled back.
Then there’s “Blackbird,” one of those songs where explaining it through Creed almost feels insulting to the song. You don’t need to know where Mark came from to understand why it works. You don’t need to know The Mayfield Four or that Myles once opened shows for Creed, and Brian and Flip’s years underneath another singer aren’t required context either.
You can simply hear what these four people had become together. The guitar work between Mark and Myles became part of the band’s identity, but the song also gave Myles room to carry grief in a way that was completely his own. Brian and Flip knew when to support that weight and when to let the guitars and vocals carry it.
That’s what a band sounds like once everybody understands their place without being trapped by it. I was watching them during that period without thinking about the music in these terms. I liked Creed, and I liked Alter Bridge. There wasn’t some competition happening in my head where enjoying one meant I had to pick a side against the other.
Apparently everybody inside this story needed a lot more time before things could become that uncomplicated. Fans can put two records next to each other and love both of them without asking the records to resolve old relationships for us. The people who made those records don’t have that luxury. They carry the arguments, loyalties, disappointments, and unfinished conversations that an audience can conveniently leave outside the music. I could love Creed and Alter Bridge at the same time without needing either band to explain what the other one meant, but the people moving between those bands still had their own history to work through.
Creed was about to come back before they had completely reached that point.
FULL CIRCLE 🟡
On September 1, 2009, I was standing in front of Creed again. By this point, my concert history with these guys had become kind of ridiculous without me intentionally doing any of it. I’d seen Creed in 2002, Scott in 2006, Alter Bridge in 2007 and 2008, and now Scott, Mark, Brian, Flip, and (also Eric Friedman!) were standing together again.
The significance of Brian being part of that lineup is easy to overlook because the reunion itself was the headline, but Full Circle wasn’t simply Creed making its first album since Weathered. It was the first Creed studio album with Brian Marshall since Human Clay, and that matters.
The four people who had originally built Creed were actually making a record together again, but none of them were returning empty-handed. Brian and Flip had years of Alter Bridge behind them. Mark had spent those same years pushing his guitar playing and songwriting into places Creed had never really gone. Scott had made The Great Divide and spent years learning what his voice sounded like without Mark underneath it.
That’s why I think Full Circle deserves more credit as an album than it sometimes gets. It wasn’t simply an attempt to prove Creed could still sound like Creed. In places, it sounds like four people trying to figure out what Creed was allowed to sound like after everything they had become separately.
“Overcome” makes that clear immediately. There is more aggression in the guitar work and a harder edge underneath Scott than someone expecting another “With Arms Wide Open” might have anticipated. You can hear years of Mark becoming a different guitarist without the song suddenly becoming Alter Bridge. Flip meets that heavier version of Mark naturally because he’d spent the intervening years going there with him, and Brian’s return gives the bottom end a person and personality again rather than asking Mark to carry both guitar and bass as he had on Weathered.
“Bread of Shame” pushes even harder into that side of the band, and “Fear” has some of the same willingness to let Creed become heavier without pretending the previous records never existed. That’s one of the things I appreciate more about Full Circle now. The album didn’t make the safest possible reunion choice. They could have spent twelve songs trying to reverse engineer Human Clay, and they didn’t.
Then you have “Rain,” which proves the melodic side of Creed was still completely intact. It has the openness and accessibility people expected from the band, but it doesn’t feel like they’re desperately trying to write “My Sacrifice” again. “Away in Silence” gives the record another kind of breathing room, while “A Thousand Faces” feels particularly suited to a band trying to reconcile multiple versions of itself.
The title track deserves more attention too because “Full Circle” complicates the idea of returning in a way I appreciate more now. In 2009, the title seemed almost perfectly designed for the story everyone wanted the reunion to tell. Creed had broken apart, everybody went away, and now the original four were together again.
Except returning to the same band doesn’t automatically repair everything that happened there. They had enough connection left to make a record, tour, and rediscover something that clearly still mattered to all four of them, but they hadn’t necessarily solved the reasons it had become impossible the first time. Even “Time,“ sitting near the end of the record, lands differently after everything that happened later because time is ultimately the thing this version of Creed still needed more of.
None of that makes Full Circle a failed record to me. If anything, it makes it more interesting. It’s a document of four people proving the musical connection was still there before they had completely figured out what to do with the personal one. That’s a distinction I didn’t really have the language for when the album came out. At the time, a reunion feels binary: the band is back or it isn’t. With enough distance, it becomes obvious that returning to a stage and rebuilding trust are completely different processes. One can happen in time for the tour announcement. The other doesn’t care about anybody’s schedule.
I saw Creed again on August 15, 2010, less than a year after Full Circle came out. At that point I had watched almost every configuration this particular musical family had produced, and I had no idea I was about to see another long separation begin.
THE ALBUM THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN ❓
After the Full Circle cycle, Creed didn’t immediately disappear again. They continued touring through 2012, and for a while there was every reason to believe another album was going to follow. Work toward a fifth record began; songs were discussed and developed, and this didn’t initially look like another ending. They had already done the difficult part from the outside. Scott, Mark, Brian, and Flip had gotten back into a room, made Full Circle, put Creed back on the road, and proved there was still an audience waiting for them.
The next album never happened.
It’s easy to look at the second Creed separation and treat it like a quieter version of 2004, but that’s not really what happened. There wasn’t the same clean break or one announcement that neatly divides everything into before and after. The album stalled, relationships around the band became strained again, and eventually everybody went back toward the other lives they had already built. Alter Bridge was established by then. Scott had a solo career. Mark was about to open another door with Tremonti. Brian and Flip had somewhere else to make music. Creed could stop moving without leaving the same vacuum it had created the first time.
That explains what everybody did afterward, but it doesn’t completely explain why Creed couldn’t keep moving. Leaving the story there would also skip over something important, especially knowing what Scott has talked about in the years since. The problems around Creed weren’t separate from what Scott was dealing with personally.
Scott had been dealing with depression, addiction, and substance abuse for years, including through earlier parts of Creed‘s history. He has been open about using alcohol and drugs to change the way he felt and about not fully understanding the mental-health issues underneath what he was trying to medicate. I don’t think that means every problem Creed ever had can be placed at Scott’s feet, and reducing either ending to one person would flatten a much more complicated history. Mark and Scott had their own damaged relationship. Brian had already left Creed once before any of this. There were business pressures, old resentments, and years of things that didn’t disappear simply because four people were capable of making another album and standing onstage together again.
What it does mean is that one of the people at the center of Creed was still struggling with something much larger than whether four guys could agree on another record.
That’s one of the things I understand differently about Full Circle now. The musical connection had already proven it could survive the first breakup. What hadn’t been resolved was everything underneath it, including problems Scott himself still didn’t fully understand. Getting the band back together and becoming healthy enough to keep it together turned out to be two very different things.
The years after Creed went inactive again forced that issue in a way nobody involved would have chosen. Scott released Proof of Life in 2013 and continued trying to move his solo career forward, but by 2014 his life had unraveled publicly during a severe mental-health crisis complicated by substance abuse. It happened in front of everybody, through videos, statements, and headlines that made an intensely personal collapse almost impossible to keep personal. From the outside, it was easy for the spectacle of it to become the story. Underneath all of that was a person who was very clearly unwell.
Scott eventually entered treatment that addressed both the addiction and the mental-health issues underneath it. Even the diagnosis itself became part of a process rather than a neat answer. He was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder during that period, but after sustained sobriety and further evaluation, he later explained that the diagnosis had been revised and that major depressive disorder and anxiety, alongside addiction and the effects of substance abuse, better described what he was dealing with. I don’t think we need to turn this into an argument over labels, because the more important part of the story is that he finally began getting help for the whole problem instead of only one piece of it.
Recovery didn’t erase what had happened. It couldn’t give Creed back the years they lost, undo damaged relationships, or make every decision Scott had made while struggling disappear. It gave him the opportunity to start living differently, and over the years that followed, he rebuilt his life, continued making music, and became increasingly open about the work involved in staying healthy. I think that distinction matters because recovery stories can become almost too neat when we tell them backward. We know Scott eventually gets to a much better place, Creed eventually finds its way back, and suddenly everything before that can look like a straight road leading toward redemption. It wasn’t. There were years of work between the collapse and the version of Scott who would eventually stand beside Mark, Brian, and Flip again.
I don’t think we can separate that work from Creed eventually finding each other again.
It’s tempting with bands to talk about repaired relationships as though everybody eventually had the right conversation. Somebody apologized, somebody forgave them, everybody shook hands, and suddenly the thing that couldn’t work before works again. Real relationships usually aren’t that neat, and Creed‘s certainly weren’t. Part of repairing a relationship is becoming healthy enough to participate differently in it. Scott wasn’t the same person approaching Mark, Brian and Flip that he’d been during some of Creed‘s worst periods, just as none of those three were exactly the people they’d been twenty years earlier.
None of that turns the past into something cleaner than it was or excuses everything that happened inside it. Recovery isn’t a time machine, and understanding why somebody behaved a certain way isn’t the same thing as pretending the behavior didn’t affect other people. What recovery can do is stop the worst period of someone’s life from making every decision about what comes afterward. Scott still had to live with the history, and the other members of Creed still had every right to their own feelings about it. Repairing those relationships required more than Scott getting sober or receiving treatment, but without Scott becoming healthier, I don’t know how much room there ever would have been to repair them at all.
That’s one of the biggest differences between the reunion that produced Full Circle and the Creed we’re watching now. In 2009, they proved they could still make music together before all of the underlying problems had actually been resolved. The current era came after Scott had spent years in recovery, after the relationships had been given something the first reunion never really had enough of, which was time without the immediate pressure of needing Creed to function.
Everybody else changed during those years too. Mark, Brian, and Flip continued building Alter Bridge into a career that had long since stopped needing to be explained through Creed. Mark built Tremonti beside it and discovered his own voice in the process. Myles had his own entire collection of branches growing from the same tree. Nobody was sitting around waiting for the old band to become available again.
That matters more than I think it initially appears to. When one band carries your entire identity, every disagreement inside that band threatens everything. By the time Creed eventually found its way back to one another, all four of them knew they could exist without Creed because they had already spent years doing exactly that. Coming back could be a choice instead of a necessity.
The fences between Scott and the rest of the band also had time to genuinely mend. I don’t mean that in the vague reunion-interview way where everybody says the past is behind them because there are tour dates to promote. The way Scott and Mark in particular have talked about each other in this current era feels different because there is an acknowledgment that the relationship itself had to change. Time, maturity, recovery, and perspective didn’t make the old history disappear, but they seem to have made preserving the old battles less important than deciding what kind of relationship they wanted to have now.
That’s part of why the current version of Creed feels less fragile to me than the 2009 reunion does in hindsight. By the time they returned, everybody involved had built enough life outside the band that coming back didn’t require pretending those years belonged to another life. Creed had become something they could choose again rather than something any of them needed to make the rest of their musical lives work.
That story takes years to reach the Summer of ’99 era, though, and the years when Creed wasn’t moving were anything but empty.
Instead of one band breaking into two roads, the whole thing started branching in almost every direction. That’s where the family-tree idea becomes more useful than talking about side projects. A side project sounds temporary, like something somebody does until the main job calls again. By this point there wasn’t one obvious trunk with a collection of smaller branches hanging from it. There were musicians with several legitimate creative homes, and each one was beginning to feed something back into the others. Mark could learn something about singing through Tremonti that changed him as a writer. Myles could stand beside Slash and bring a different confidence back to Alter Bridge. Brian and Flip could spend years navigating Alter Bridge‘s increasingly expansive arrangements and still understand exactly what a Creed song needed from them.
That branching becomes important because the next decade isn’t really a story about Creed at all. It’s a story about everything that grew while Creed was gone.
AB III 3️⃣
Creed was still very much part of the present when AB III arrived in 2010, which is worth remembering because none of these different pieces of the story wait politely for the others to finish. Full Circle had only come out the year before, Creed was still touring, and I had just seen them again in August 2010. Mark, Brian, and Flip weren’t looking back at something they’d done years earlier while making this record. They were actively living inside both bands at the same time, and somehow the Alter Bridge side of that equation was moving farther away from Creed than it ever had before.
If Blackbird was the record where Alter Bridge stopped feeling like three guys from Creed with a new singer, AB III was the record where the band seemed considerably less interested in proving anything to anybody.
“Slip to the Void” pretty much tells you that immediately. Even the way the album starts feels different. Myles comes in almost alone before everything eventually opens underneath him, and instead of rushing toward the kind of enormous chorus Alter Bridge could easily have delivered by this point, the song spends time building this uneasy feeling before letting the guitars take over. Then “Isolation” comes along and proves they can still make something much more immediate without suddenly making the album feel lighter. It was one of the biggest rock songs Alter Bridge had made at that point, but it still belongs completely inside the darker world the rest of the record is building.
“Ghost of Days Gone By” has always been another interesting one for me because it initially feels almost nostalgic and comfortable, then you actually pay attention to what Myles is singing about and realize the song isn’t nearly as comfortable as it sounds. That’s something Alter Bridge had gotten increasingly good at by this point. The music can open up and give you this huge melodic release while the thing underneath it is considerably less reassuring.
The deeper you get into AB III, the less interested the record seems in giving anybody a clean answer. “Isolation” can be direct and muscular, while “Words Darker Than Their Wings” goes somewhere much stranger and more emotionally unresolved.
None of that existed yet in 2010.
That’s what makes going backward to “Words Darker Than Their Wings” so much fun now. Mark isn’t simply pushed a little higher in the background vocals or given a small part because it might be interesting to hear him sing. He and Myles are carrying different sides of the song, and you can already hear why those two voices would eventually work so well together. Myles can go places Mark simply can’t, while Mark has this lower weight to his voice that Myles doesn’t have in the same way. The song doesn’t need either of them to sound like the other one.
The singer who would eventually front Tremonti was already there. He just hadn’t built the band that required him yet.
Myles was changing inside Alter Bridge too, although after spending more time with The Mayfield Four earlier in this post, I don’t really think changing is the right word. Some of the darker and more introspective writing was already part of him. Alter Bridge simply gave it another shape.
The questions around faith are probably where that becomes the most obvious. Creed had spent years surrounded by conversations about religion because Scott wrote so openly with Christian imagery even while the band pushed back against being labeled a Christian band. Myles comes at some of those same enormous questions from almost the opposite direction on AB III. A lot of this record isn’t about reaching toward certainty. It’s about what happens when certainty starts disappearing.
That gets even more interesting when you put Myles beside Mark, because Mark’s own faith remained important to him. They didn’t have to agree on the answer before they could make music about the question, and I like that much more than if AB III had tried to resolve all of this by the end of the record. Myles could write honestly from doubt, Mark could bring his own perspective into the room, and neither one had to convince the other before the song could work. The tension was allowed to stay there.
By album three, that feels like a pretty good description of Alter Bridge in general. These four guys didn’t need to become the same people for the band to work. Myles and Mark didn’t need to see the world the same way. Brian and Flip didn’t need to become different musicians just because the songs around them were getting more complicated.
That’s another part of AB III I probably appreciate more now than I did when it came out. Mark’s guitar is obviously going to get attention on any Alter Bridge record, and by this point Myles was contributing enough guitar that the band could have become ridiculously crowded if everybody played like they were trying to win every second.
Instead, Brian and Flip give all of it somewhere to sit.
Brian can move around underneath the guitars without constantly trying to compete with them, while Flip seems to understand exactly when these songs need him to push harder and when the best thing he can do is keep the center from moving while everything above him does. That’s probably not the part of an Alter Bridge song most people immediately talk about, but it’s a huge reason these records can keep getting more ambitious without feeling like four musicians all trying to prove how much they can play at the same time.
There are moments where the best thing Brian or Flip does is leave room for somebody else, and I think that becomes increasingly important as Alter Bridge becomes more ambitious.
Mark’s writing was stretching too. Blackbird had already shown how far Alter Bridge could go when they let a song take the long way around, and AB III pushed even further into that instinct. The band could still write something immediate, but it no longer seemed interested in making immediacy the requirement.
The timing makes all of this even more interesting because Creed wasn’t ancient history anymore. Creed had returned, Full Circle existed, and Mark, Brian, and Flip were actively living inside both bands again. Yet Alter Bridge didn’t respond to any of that by moving closer to Creed or trying to protect itself from the comparison. If anything, they went farther in the other direction and made one of the darkest, most distinctly Alter Bridge records they’d done.
I think that says more about how established this band was by 2010 than almost anything else could. In 2004, there was probably no way to talk about One Day Remains without Creed occupying half the conversation because everybody was still trying to understand what this new thing was and why three members of Creed were standing beside somebody who wasn’t Scott Stapp. Six years later, Creed could literally be active at the same time, and Alter Bridge didn’t need that comparison to explain itself anymore.
More importantly, Mark, Brian and Flip were already proving that Creed and Alter Bridge didn’t automatically have to erase one another. They could make Full Circle with Scott, go onstage as Creed, and then return to Myles and make something that lived in an entirely different part of them. Musically, the two bands were already capable of existing at the same time. Whether everything around Creed was stable enough to keep that arrangement moving was a different question.
Nobody knew in 2010 that this version of Creed was going to stall again, and nobody knew how many other things were about to grow out of these same few years. Myles was beginning another relationship with Slash that would become much bigger than a guest appearance. Mark was writing so much music that even having Creed and Alter Bridge apparently wasn’t enough places to put all of it.
That’s where AB III leaves this story for me. Alter Bridge didn’t need to prove it could survive Creed anymore because it had become something Creed‘s existence couldn’t really threaten.
Mark was about to discover that even two bands weren’t enough.
ALL I WAS 😈
Then Mark opened another door, and this time he walked through it himself.
By 2012, that probably sounds almost ridiculous when you lay everything beside each other. Mark already had Creed, a band that had sold tens of millions of records and was active again, and Alter Bridge, which had long since stopped needing Creed to explain why it existed. Apparently, two bands still weren’t enough places for everything he was writing.
That’s where Tremonti begins.
I think that’s an important distinction because it’s easy to talk about Tremonti as though the name simply means Mark whenever we’re moving quickly through his career. It obviously begins with him, but the project became a band pretty quickly, and the people around him changed what he could do inside it.
And once you hear what Mark had been setting aside, it becomes pretty obvious why neither of his existing bands could hold all of it.
There had always been a heavier player hiding inside the guy who wrote: “With Arms Wide Open.” Anybody paying attention to his guitar work knew that already, and Alter Bridge had given him much more room to explore it. Tremonti was different because now those instincts didn’t have to negotiate with another band’s identity at all.
The bigger surprise was that Mark was going to sing them himself.
That seems completely normal now because we’ve had six Tremonti albums to get used to his voice, but it absolutely wasn’t normal then. Mark had spent years standing beside Scott Stapp and then Myles Kennedy. He was the guitar player who wrote a lot of the songs, not the guy standing at the microphone trying to carry them.
You can hear that difference on All I Was. Mark doesn’t sound like the singer he would become several albums later because why would he? He was still figuring out what his voice could do when it had to carry an entire record instead of supporting somebody else’s.
“All I Was” and “Wish You Well” make it pretty obvious that this wasn’t going to be Alter Bridge with Mark singing instead of Myles. “Wish You Well” especially feels like Mark finally letting a part of his metal background completely off the leash, while “You Waste Your Time” has the kind of riff that immediately tells you why he needed another outlet even though he was already writing for two bands. There are pieces of Mark’s playing that make sense beside Creed and pieces that make sense beside Alter Bridge, but there are also ideas here that would have required either of those bands to become something they weren’t.
That’s really the thing I hear when I go back to All I Was now. It isn’t Mark deciding that Creed or Alter Bridge weren’t heavy enough. It’s him discovering that there were parts of his writing he had never been able to follow all the way to their natural conclusion because the bands around him were built for different things.
“New Way Out” shows another side of that because the album isn’t just Mark trying to prove how heavy he can be for twelve songs. There is melody all over All I Was, which shouldn’t surprise anybody considering who wrote it, and some of the best moments happen when the heavier instincts and the songwriter responsible for so many enormous choruses stop feeling like separate sides of him. “The Things I’ve Seen” pulls things back even farther, while “Decay” and “Leave It Alone” give the record more room between the full-speed moments.
That balance matters because Tremonti wouldn’t have lasted very long for me if the entire reason for its existence was simply “Mark Tremonti plays metal now.” The songs needed more than speed and heavier riffs to become something I wanted to keep following.
Brian being part of this first record makes the family tree even stranger. He was already moving between Creed and Alter Bridge with Mark, and now here he was playing bass on Mark’s first record outside both of them. I don’t think that means we should treat the original version of Tremonti as another Creed offshoot, because the music pretty quickly argues against that, but Brian’s presence says a lot about how intertwined these relationships remained even when the music kept changing.
Eric Friedman would become increasingly important to Tremonti’s identity as the years went on. On this first album, you can already hear why Mark wanted him there. Eric gives the music another guitar voice without making the songs feel like they’re trying to recreate the Mark/Myles relationship from Alter Bridge.
That’s the distinction that matters to me with Tremonti. Mark is obviously at the center. His name is literally on the thing, the songs begin with him, and his guitar is the most obvious musical fingerprint. But a solo project and a band built around one person’s writing aren’t automatically the same thing.
That process wasn’t finished on All I Was yet. It didn’t need to be. The first record only had to prove there was enough music here to justify opening another door, and I think it did that pretty convincingly.
What he probably couldn’t have known yet was how permanent that decision would become. Tremonti wasn’t going to be the record Mark made when his other bands gave him some free time. It was going to become another full career running beside them.
That part matters far beyond Tremonti. The voice he was still figuring out on All I Was would eventually become strong enough to carry an entire other musical world none of us could have predicted from this record.
Frank Sinatra was still a very long way from here.
First, Scott had another record to make.
PROOF OF LIFE 💿
While Mark was discovering that he could stand at the microphone himself, Scott was getting ready to make his second solo record, and by the time Proof of Life arrived in 2013, eight years had passed since The Great Divide. That’s a long time between albums, especially for somebody who had once been part of a band that released My Own Prison, Human Clay, and Weathered in the space of about four years.
A lot had happened in those eight years, including Creed getting back together, making Full Circle, touring again, and then reaching the point where another attempt at a record couldn’t get across the finish line. Scott wasn’t making Proof of Life as the guy who had simply left Creed behind anymore. He’d gone back. He’d stood on those stages again, made another album with Mark, Brian and Flip, and experienced firsthand that putting Creed back together didn’t automatically fix everything that had made it fall apart the first time.
That changes the way I hear Proof of Life compared with The Great Divide. Scott had already proven he could make a record without Creed. This one feels more like somebody trying to figure out what surviving everything that happened afterward was actually supposed to look like.
The title alone tells you quite a bit about where his head was. Proof of Life doesn’t sound like somebody declaring victory from the other side of every problem. It sounds like somebody checking his own pulse.
I don’t mean that as dramatically as it probably sounds. What I like about the record is that there is still struggle all over it. Scott hadn’t suddenly become a guy writing from some perfectly healed place where every bad thing had been turned into a lesson and neatly filed away. “Slow Suicide” is probably the clearest example. Even without treating every word as a literal diary entry, there’s no missing what Scott was interested in confronting. Self-destruction wasn’t some abstract subject for him by this point.
There’s an important difference between recognizing that and pretending we can use the album to diagnose the person making it. I don’t want to do that, especially knowing what we know now. Scott has been open about his addiction and mental health struggles, but that doesn’t mean every dark line he wrote gives us access to what was happening inside his head on a particular Tuesday in 2013. The songs can tell us what he was willing to wrestle with publicly. That’s enough.
“Slow Suicide” works because Scott isn’t writing about destruction from a safe distance. There’s frustration in it, but there’s also recognition. By this point, he’d had enough experience with addiction, damaged relationships, and his own behavior to understand that some of the worst things happening in his life weren’t simply things being done to him. That’s not an easy place to write from, and I think it gives Proof of Life some of the self-awareness that The Great Divide couldn’t possibly have had in the same way.
Then there’s “Only One,” which reaches toward something much more hopeful without making the darker parts of the record disappear, and “Break Out,” which has more of the forward-moving rock energy Scott has always been comfortable with. “Hit Me More” has a swagger to it that keeps the album from spending its entire running time staring inward, while “Jesus Was a Rockstar” is probably one of those titles where you know immediately that subtlety isn’t going to be the goal. This was still Scott Stapp. Even when he was making a deeply personal record, he wasn’t suddenly going to stop reaching for big ideas.
“New Day Coming” might be the song that makes the record’s position in his story easiest for me to understand. There’s hope there, but it’s hope coming from somebody who knows exactly why he needs it. That’s different from pretending the hard part is finished. Sometimes believing there can be a new day and actually getting yourself to it are two completely different things.
That distinction becomes painful with hindsight because Proof of Life can sound like a record about survival, accountability, and trying to move forward, and then you keep reading Scott’s story and realize the hardest parts weren’t finished with him yet.
We tend to like recovery stories once they’re finished because the finished version has a shape we understand. Somebody hits bottom, realizes something has to change, gets help, and then begins the inspiring part where everything moves in the correct direction. Scott’s story doesn’t give us anything that clean. As we’ve already seen, the period after Proof of Life became one of the worst of his life before he eventually got the treatment, sobriety, and a better understanding of his mental health that helped him build something more stable.
That makes the hope on this record much harder for me to dismiss just because Scott wasn’t able to hold onto it yet. Somebody can understand exactly what they’re doing to themselves and still do it again. They can mean every word when they say they want something different and still end up back inside the thing they were trying to escape. Proof of Life doesn’t become false because Scott struggled afterward. It becomes a record made by somebody who knew he wanted to survive before he completely knew how.
That makes the title Proof of Life hit differently for me now.
In 2013, it could sound like a statement from somebody who had survived the worst of it and was ready to show everyone he was still standing. More than a decade later, I hear something less finished in it. Proof that you’re alive isn’t proof that you’ve figured out how to live. Sometimes it’s only proof that you’re still here long enough to keep trying.
And Scott did keep trying.
Hearing it now, I don’t think the album belongs at either end of Scott’s story. It wasn’t the end of Scott’s struggle, and it wasn’t the clean beginning of his recovery either. It was one part of a much longer process, made by somebody already reaching toward a version of his life he wasn’t quite able to hold onto yet.
There are also musical differences from The Great Divide that I appreciate more when the records are sitting beside each other. Scott sounds more settled inside his voice on a lot of Proof of Life, even when the subject matter isn’t settled at all. The production feels less interested in sanding away every rough edge, which suits a record this concerned with surviving yourself.
That doesn’t mean Creed had stopped mattering to Scott. Clearly it hadn’t. The failed attempt to follow Full Circle was still recent, and there were relationships there that remained unresolved. But his solo career was becoming something he could continue whether Creed figured itself out or not.
He was going to need that.
Because after Proof of Life, Creed would spend years as something everybody talked about in the past tense, while the other branches of this family tree kept getting bigger.
At the same time, Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip were about to make one of the most ambitious records Alter Bridge had attempted yet.
FORTRESS 🏰
While Scott was trying to find something more stable on his side of the story, Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip went back into Alter Bridge and made Fortress in 2013, and by this point there really wasn’t much left of the question that had followed them around when One Day Remains came out. Nobody needed to explain why three guys from Creed were making music with Myles Kennedy anymore. Alter Bridge had been together for almost a decade, Blackbird and AB III had pushed the band farther away from where it started, and Fortress feels like four people realizing there wasn’t much reason to put a ceiling on where they could go next.
I’ve always thought Fortress was one of the records where Alter Bridge stopped sounding like a band still proving what it could be and started sounding completely comfortable with what it had become.
“Cry of Achilles” tells you that before the album has really even gotten started. Opening a record with this quiet acoustic guitar could have been the setup for something much safer, but then the rest of the band arrives, and the song just keeps growing. It doesn’t rush toward one idea and sit there. Mark and Myles move around each other on guitar, Brian gets plenty of room underneath them, and Flip keeps pushing everything forward while the song moves through several different places without ever making me feel like I’m listening to a bunch of sections somebody figured out how to glue together.
That’s the thing I like about the more progressive side of Alter Bridge. I’m not interested in a seven-minute song just because somebody managed to make it seven minutes long. If you’re going to take that much of my time, please have somewhere interesting to go.
Then “Addicted to Pain” comes along and reminds you they can still get to the point a hell of a lot faster when they want to. That song doesn’t need the same amount of space because the riff and chorus are perfectly happy punching you in the face for four minutes and leaving. I like having both of those sides of Alter Bridge on the same record because it keeps Fortress from becoming the album where every song has to be an event.
“Bleed It Dry” gets nasty in a different way, with one of those riffs where Mark reminds you that the guy responsible for some of the biggest radio-rock songs of the late ’90s and early 2000s has always had a much heavier player living underneath them. By this point, Tremonti existed too, which makes the heaviness on Fortress more interesting to me. Giving Mark another band where he could push much farther into metal didn’t pull that side out of Alter Bridge. If anything, it seems to have made the distinction clearer. He could bring a heavy riff into either room and let the people standing around him determine what happened to it next.
That difference matters because Fortress doesn’t sound like Tremonti even when Mark pushes into territory he could comfortably use there. The identity of the band changes what the riff becomes.
Then there’s “Waters Rising.”
We’d already heard Mark step much farther forward vocally on “Words Darker Than Their Wings,” and All I Was had answered any remaining question about whether he could carry lead vocals. “Waters Rising” brings that voice back into Alter Bridge and lets it exist beside Myles instead of somewhere outside the band.
And it works.
I think that’s important because it would have been incredibly easy for Mark singing an Alter Bridge song to feel like a novelty. Let the guitar player have one, everybody has fun, and then we go back to the normal arrangement. “Waters Rising” doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels like the band had genuinely discovered another voice it could use.
Knowing everything Mark eventually does vocally makes it even more fun to hear now. Tremonti would keep forcing him to grow as a singer because there was nowhere to hide when he was standing at the microphone every night, but “Waters Rising” lets some of that growth come back into Alter Bridge.
Myles was stretching in his own directions at the same time. His guitar playing had become far more important to the band than it was on One Day Remains, and by Fortress the two-guitar identity of Alter Bridge was completely established. Mark didn’t need to carry every guitar idea because Myles could answer him, challenge him, or take the entire thing somewhere else.
That’s also where Brian becomes even more important than he sometimes gets credit for. Put two guitar players like Mark and Myles in the same band, give them increasingly ambitious arrangements, and then imagine trying to find somewhere useful for the bass to live. Brian doesn’t spend Fortress hiding underneath them. There are places where his bass becomes another melodic piece of what’s happening, but he also seems to know when adding more would just turn everything into noise.
Flip has a similar job. There is a lot of movement on this album, and the songs don’t always announce where they’re going next, but his playing keeps them grounded enough that the changes don’t feel like the band is turning corners simply because it can. I think that’s part of why Fortress can be more progressive without suddenly feeling like Alter Bridge decided to become a progressive-metal band. Brian and Flip keep the songs connected to the groove even when Mark and Myles wander much farther away from the place they started.
“Calm the Fire” might be one of my favorite examples of how much atmosphere Alter Bridge could build by this point. It doesn’t need to come charging out immediately. Myles gets room to build the tension before the song opens up, and when it does, that size feels earned rather than automatic. “Lover” lives in another uncomfortable emotional space entirely, and the way Myles moves through that song is a reminder that all the musical growth in the world wouldn’t matter much if these songs stopped making you feel something.
That’s ultimately why Fortress works for me. There is a version of this record where Alter Bridge becomes so impressed with what it can do that the songs disappear underneath the musicianship. Instead, the technical stuff usually serves the emotion instead of replacing it.
Then you get to “Fortress.”
By the time the title track closes the album, everything Alter Bridge had been becoming since Blackbird feels like it has fully arrived.
The title itself also fits this period of Alter Bridge in a way I don’t think anybody could have planned when the band started. A fortress is supposed to be the thing that protects you from whatever is outside. By 2013, Alter Bridge had become sturdy enough that everything happening outside it didn’t threaten the band’s identity anymore.
I don’t think that means Alter Bridge became some safe place where nothing could touch them. That’s a little too neat, especially considering how many other projects everybody was carrying by then. I think it means the band had become strong enough to absorb all of those outside experiences without losing itself.
Compare that with One Day Remains, when Mark had written most of the material before Myles was fully part of the creative process and somebody could still reasonably hear the record as the bridge between Creed and whatever came next.
By Fortress, nobody could make that argument anymore.
Myles was deeply inside the writing. Mark had another band of his own. Brian and Flip had spent nearly a decade developing alongside all of it. The four of them had made enough music together that Alter Bridge didn’t have to consciously avoid sounding like Creed because Creed wasn’t the measuring stick anymore.
Somehow, even Fortress wasn’t the end of how far they could push it.
The next few years would get crowded quickly. Mark had discovered Tremonti was more than a one-record outlet, Myles’ work with Slash was becoming another career of its own, and Scott was still trying to figure out what stability looked like on his side of the tree.
For Mark, the next thing waiting was a pile of material big enough that one Tremonti record wasn’t going to hold it.
WITH ARMS WIDE OPEN: A RETROSPECTIVE 👐
Creed itself was mostly absent from this period, but in 2015 the past briefly opened back up with With Arms Wide Open: A Retrospective. On the surface, it was exactly what the title suggested: a three-disc collection looking across a band that increasingly seemed like it belonged to history. The first disc gathered the singles everybody knew, but the other two made the collection much more interesting than another greatest-hits package with a different cover.
The rarities disc is where the collection gets a lot more interesting to me because it pulled together some of the things that had spent years scattered around the edges of Creed‘s catalog. “To Whom It May Concern,” “Is This the End,” “Bound and Tied,” “Young Grow Old,” and “Silent Teacher” were all there, along with their cover of Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” and performances of The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” and “Riders on the Storm.” None of those songs suddenly changes the story we’ve been following, but putting them together reminds me just how much Creed existed outside the four studio albums and the giant singles everybody remembers.
The third disc went in another direction with acoustic and live acoustic versions from across the catalog. “My Own Prison,” “With Arms Wide Open,” “My Sacrifice,” “Rain,” “Overcome,” “Torn,” and “Higher” were among the songs collected there, and I think that side of Creed is worth having in something trying to look back at the whole band too. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about how enormous Creed became, and the music itself could be enormous right along with them. Take some of that size away, and you’re left with another reminder that the songs underneath all of it still had to work.
Then, sitting among all of that history on the rarities disc, were three things we actually hadn’t heard before: “Blistered,” “More Than This” and “Why.” Three previously unreleased demos showing up on a collection called A Retrospective didn’t exactly make them feel like the beginning of something in 2015. At that point, they felt more like a few things we hadn’t gotten to hear the first time around.
They don’t all come from the same moment in Creed‘s history, which actually makes them more interesting here. “Blistered” reaches all the way back to the My Own Prison sessions, while “More Than This” came from the Full Circle sessions. “Why” arrived beside them without the retrospective assigning it as neatly to one of those album eras. Instead of giving us the lost fifth Creed record people had once expected after Full Circle, the collection opened several different doors into things Creed had left behind.
“More Than This” is probably the one that matters most to this part of the story because of where it sits historically. Creed had reunited, made Full Circle, toured again, and started down the road toward another album before everything stopped. Hearing another song from those sessions in 2015 didn’t suddenly tell us what a fifth Creed album would have sounded like, and I don’t think a demo should be asked to answer a question that large. It did remind us that Full Circle hadn’t necessarily exhausted what Scott and Mark were capable of creating together during that reunion era.
There is something strange about hearing unfinished or previously unreleased Creed music during a period when the band itself seemed finished. Mark, Brian, and Flip were deep into Alter Bridge. Tremonti was becoming another real band. Scott was entering the most difficult and ultimately transformative period of his life. There wasn’t much reason yet to believe another Creed chapter was waiting for any of them, so a release called A Retrospective felt almost too appropriate. The singles were there. The rarities were finally collected in one place. We had acoustic versions spanning the catalog and even a few things we’d never officially heard before. In 2015, it really did feel like we were being given a more complete look at what Creed had been rather than any reason to start wondering what they might still become.
That’s what changes the meaning of those demos now. They aren’t evidence that the fifth Creed album secretly exists somewhere waiting to be released, and they aren’t three pieces of the same abandoned record. They’re pieces of unfinished history from different points in the band’s life, including one from a reunion era that had already failed to produce the next chapter people once thought might be coming.
Ten years later, the idea of unfinished Creed music would mean something completely different.
CAUTERIZE AND DUST 🔥
If All I Was proved Mark had enough music inside him to justify opening another door, Cauterize and Dust proved Tremonti wasn’t going to be a temporary project.
I’ve never really liked treating them as one giant album somebody happened to cut in half, though. They’re obviously connected and share a lot of the same DNA, but they don’t feel interchangeable to me. Cauterize has its own flow and personality, and when Dust followed less than a year later, it didn’t feel like somebody had gone back into the studio closet and found another pile of songs that weren’t good enough to make the first record. There is enough good material across both of them that I’m actually glad Mark didn’t try to cram everything into one enormous album just because it had all been written around the same time.
The band around Mark had changed since All I Was, too. Brian played bass on that first record, which gave the beginning of Tremonti another direct connection back into the larger family tree. By the time these sessions happened, Wolfgang Van Halen had become the bass player.
Eric was becoming a much bigger part of that too, and I think he’s important when talking about why Tremonti eventually stopped feeling like Mark plus whichever musicians happened to be available. Eric wasn’t there to imitate Myles or create another version of the guitar partnership Mark already had in Alter Bridge. He had his own relationship with Mark’s playing, and that relationship was getting stronger.
That’s one of the differences I hear when I go from All I Was into Cauterize. The first record still has some of that feeling of Mark discovering what happens when nobody else is standing in front of the microphone. By the time you get to these sessions, Tremonti sounds much more comfortable being Tremonti.
“Radical Change” doesn’t waste much time getting there. The heavier side Mark finally gave himself permission to chase on All I Was is still very much alive, but it feels more natural now, less like he’s opening the cage to show everybody what’s been hiding in there and more like this is simply another part of the music he makes. “Flying Monkeys” gets even uglier in the best possible way, with that slow, heavy riff giving Mark room to sound far more menacing than anybody whose entire frame of reference was “With Arms Wide Open” probably expected.
Then “Another Heart” reminds you that Mark Tremonti is still Mark Tremonti, and I think that’s one of the reasons this band has always worked better for me than it would have if the entire idea was simply letting Mark make metal records. He can tune everything down, play faster, make the guitars heavier, and surround himself with musicians who can follow him anywhere he wants to go, but eventually the guy who spent years writing enormous melodies is going to show up. “Another Heart” is ridiculously catchy underneath all of that weight, and instead of those two sides fighting each other, they become part of what Tremonti does especially well.
The rest of Cauterize gives him room to move between them. The title track sits in a darker place, “Flying Monkeys” gets weird in exactly the way a song called “Flying Monkeys” should get weird, and “Providence” closes the album with something much larger and more patient.
Mark’s voice was changing right along with the band. Going back to All I Was after hearing everything he’s done since is interesting because you can hear somebody learning how to be a lead singer in real time.
I imagine having to stand there and sing entire shows probably helped with that too. Mark had spent most of his career beside two singers who could take over a room almost immediately. Scott’s voice was one of the defining pieces of Creed, and Myles is Myles Kennedy, which is basically its own unfair category at this point. Mark could sing harmonies and take larger parts in Alter Bridge, but there was still somewhere to retreat when Myles was standing next to him. Tremonti didn’t give him that option. If he was going to front this band, eventually he had to stop thinking of himself as the guitar player who also sang and get comfortable being the singer too.
You can hear him getting there across these records. There is more control, more confidence, and a better understanding of where his voice actually sounds strongest. He could still push into the rougher delivery when a song needed it, but he didn’t have to attack every line to prove he belonged behind the microphone. The more comfortable Mark became with that, the more melodic room Tremonti suddenly had available without needing to borrow somebody else’s voice to get there.
Then Dust arrived less than a year later, and this is where I think separating the two records really matters. It came from the same sessions as Cauterize, but I’ve never heard it as the leftovers album. “My Last Mistake” comes out swinging hard enough to get rid of that idea pretty quickly, and “The Cage” is one of those songs where the speed and melody Tremonti had been learning to balance start feeling completely natural together. Nothing sounds like Mark is trying to demonstrate that he can play this way anymore. Of course he can. By this point the more interesting question is what kind of songs the band can build around it.
The title track answers that from another direction. “Dust” slows things down and gives Mark one of those huge choruses that makes it impossible to forget who we’re listening to, even when everything surrounding him is much heavier than Creed or most of Alter Bridge. I love that Mark never seemed interested in sacrificing melody just to make Tremonti more legitimate as a metal band. If he writes something you can sing back at him, he’s going to use it. Considering how many giant choruses he’s written over the years, pretending that instinct suddenly disappeared because he wanted to play faster would probably have felt a lot less authentic anyway.
“Once Dead” can turn around and push back into the heavier side, while “Unable to See” lets the album finish somewhere much more vulnerable. That’s the balance I think Tremonti needed if it was ever going to last beyond being Mark’s outlet for one specific part of himself. The band could absolutely flatten you when it wanted to, but by Dust it was getting equally comfortable knowing when that wasn’t what the song needed.
The biggest change for me across Cauterize and Dust, though, is probably how quickly I stop thinking about the fact that Mark is the singer.
By Dust, I don’t really hear it that way anymore. I’m not listening to Mark because it’s interesting that the guitar player can sing. I’m listening to him because he’s the singer of Tremonti, and those are two very different things.
That development ended up mattering outside Tremonti too. Once Mark knew he could carry a melody himself, he had another creative option that hadn’t really existed during the early Creed years. We already heard it start sneaking into Alter Bridge on “Waters Rising,” and it wasn’t going away.
By this point, that separation wasn’t something Mark needed to consciously prove anymore. Tremonti had developed enough of its own identity that a song could simply sound like this band without requiring me to explain all the ways it didn’t sound like the others.
Wolfgang would eventually move on, and his own career would take him somewhere completely different, but his time here matters because he was part of the period when Tremonti stopped being an experiment and became a real band.
By the end of Dust, Tremonti wasn’t a place Mark went when Alter Bridge or Creed weren’t available.
He’d found another way to make music that fit him.
Tremonti wasn’t finished changing either. By the end of Dust, Mark had built something stable enough that the next record didn’t need to spend any time explaining why the band existed.
Before any of that, though, Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip had another Alter Bridge record to make, and they were about to make one of their biggest.
THE LAST HERO 🎯
By the time Alter Bridge came back with The Last Hero in 2016, the band had already spent more than a decade proving it could survive everybody having other things to do.
I think you can hear some of that confidence in The Last Hero. Fortress had pushed Alter Bridge into some of the most ambitious music they’d made, and instead of retreating into something safer afterward, they kept a lot of that scale while pointing the songs toward a different kind of tension.
“Show Me a Leader” makes that pretty obvious from the beginning. There is still plenty happening musically, including an opening guitar section that lets Mark be Mark before the song really takes off, but once it gets moving, there’s an urgency to it that fits where the band was looking lyrically. The album spends a lot of time thinking about leadership, heroes, the people we put our trust in, and what happens when the people standing in those positions turn out to be much smaller than the idea we’ve built around them.
That was obviously going to feel particularly charged in 2016, but I don’t think the record only works if you leave it sitting there. We’ve had enough years since then to prove that disappointment in leaders and the search for somebody capable of being better than the moment isn’t exactly a problem humanity solved after one election cycle. I’m not particularly interested in turning this into the political section of a Creed post, and I don’t think the album needs that either. What interests me more is the question underneath all of it, because asking what we’re actually looking for when we decide somebody is supposed to save us has a much longer shelf life.
“The Writing on the Wall” keeps some of that urgency going, while “The Other Side” turns much darker and more confrontational. That’s one of the songs where Myles can sound almost threatening without having to change the fundamental character of his voice to do it. There is still that ridiculous amount of control in his voice, but control doesn’t necessarily mean pretty, and by this point Alter Bridge knew how to use the darker side of Myles without treating it like something they could only pull out once an album.
Then you get “My Champion,” which could almost feel out of place if Alter Bridge hadn’t always been able to put something openly hopeful beside much darker material without either one canceling the other out. I actually like that the album permits itself to do that because a record spending this much time wondering whether heroes still exist would get exhausting pretty quickly if the answer was always just no. Even the hope doesn’t feel particularly naive. “My Champion” is more interested in getting back up after you’ve been knocked down than pretending getting back up guarantees everything works out afterward.
Something is fitting about that coming from Alter Bridge considering how the band began, although by 2016 I don’t think they needed the Creed comparison to make the point anymore. They had spent twelve years building their own history.
That confidence gave them room for something like “This Side of Fate,” where the band could stretch again without simply repeating what worked on Fortress. This is the side of Alter Bridge I probably appreciate more as I’ve gotten older with them because the longer songs don’t feel like they’re there simply to demonstrate that everybody can play. If you’re going to keep me around for six or seven minutes, give me a reason to stay.
“This Side of Fate” does. It moves through different moods and gives Mark and Myles plenty of room musically, but the larger question about choice, consequence, and how much control we really have over where our lives go fits surprisingly well inside this entire story too. I doubt anybody was writing it because one day I’d decide to spend an absurd number of words connecting every band these five guys have ever touched, but here we are.
There are so many moments in this history that look inevitable only because we already know they happened. Creed breaking apart leads to Alter Bridge when we tell the story backward, so of course Mark called Myles, except there was nothing inevitable about The Mayfield Four opening for Creed years earlier or Mark remembering that singer when he eventually needed one. Tremonti looks like the obvious place for Mark’s heavier writing when we’re sitting here with an entire catalog of it, but there was a time when Mark Tremonti fronting another band wasn’t obvious at all. Even Creed getting back together in 2009 didn’t guarantee they’d be able to make it work the second time, which they very clearly discovered.
That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed about sitting with all of these records together instead of treating them like separate discographies. Sometimes a song gives me another way into the larger history without us having to pretend it was secretly written about that history. “This Side of Fate” doesn’t have to be about Creed, Alter Bridge, or any of the other things happening around these guys for the questions inside it to make me think about how easily this entire story could have gone differently.
By the time I get to “The Last Hero,” I don’t really hear the album asking who the hero is anymore. It feels more like it’s wondering what happened to the idea in the first place, which is probably a much more interesting question anyway. The song gets plenty of room to work through that, and like “This Side of Fate,” it earns the extra time instead of feeling like Alter Bridge decided the important songs automatically needed to be the longest ones.
It also shows just how far the band had traveled musically since One Day Remains. Mark and Myles could both take up enormous amounts of space when a song needed it, but they had also learned how to get out of each other’s way. One guitar could establish the shape while the other added color, or they could lock together and make the whole thing feel twice as large.
Underneath all of that, Brian and Flip once again had a job that probably gets less attention because neither of them was standing at the front of the stage trading guitar solos. The bigger Alter Bridge‘s arrangements became, the easier it would have been for the rhythm section to disappear underneath them, but neither one does. They give all that guitar somewhere solid to land, and when the songs shift direction, they make those changes feel like the whole band moved together instead of Mark and Myles dragging everybody else into the next section.
Brian in particular becomes fun to listen for once you stop treating the bass as something that’s supposed to sit underneath Mark’s guitar and behave itself. He’ll find spaces around the riff and move melodically when the song gives him room, but he also knows when adding anything else would just make the whole thing crowded. Flip has always seemed to have a similar sense of what these songs actually need. He can hit hard enough for the heavier side of Alter Bridge without making every moment sound like it’s trying to be the heaviest moment on the record.
That probably sounds like a small thing until you imagine what Alter Bridge would sound like if all four of them played at maximum capacity for seventy minutes.
I’d need a nap.
There’s musicianship in knowing when not to fill every available space too, and I think The Last Hero benefits from four people who had been together long enough to understand that.
Mark’s voice was another thing he brought back differently this time. Three Tremonti records had happened between Fortress and The Last Hero, and all of those hours standing at the microphone had changed what he could contribute vocally without turning Alter Bridge into his other band.
Myles had been getting a completely different education beside Slash. Singing Alter Bridge material requires plenty from him, but standing in front of Slash meant learning how to occupy songs from an entirely different rock tradition.
Mark and Myles were both bringing those outside experiences back with them, and by this point that was beginning to look less like a threat to Alter Bridge and more like part of what kept the band healthy. On paper, Mark disappearing into Tremonti while Myles went off with Slash sounds like exactly the kind of thing that could eventually pull everybody apart. Instead, both of them had room to chase ideas that didn’t necessarily belong here and then return without asking Alter Bridge to contain every version of themselves. Brian and Flip gave them a familiar center, while whatever everybody learned elsewhere could become useful without taking over the room.
I think The Last Hero sounds like a record made by people who were increasingly comfortable with that arrangement. It isn’t Fortress, and I don’t need it to beat Fortress at being Fortress. It has a different energy, a different set of questions and more urgency in places, while still giving Alter Bridge room to make the kind of oversized songs they’d gotten very good at making.
Twelve years after One Day Remains, Alter Bridge wasn’t the thing Mark, Brian, and Flip built because Creed ended anymore. It was simply Alter Bridge, with its own history, its own audience, and enough music behind it that the circumstances that created the band had become considerably less important than everything the four of them built afterward.
By then, Myles Kennedy had another band growing beside it that deserved to be treated with the same kind of seriousness.
SLASH, AND THEN SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS 🎩
Myles’ relationship with Slash is another part of this story that’s really easy to undersell because there are already so many bands competing for space. I could have dropped the entire Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators branch into a paragraph somewhere, mentioned that Myles sings with Slash too, and technically covered the information.
It certainly didn’t start with any expectation that we’d still be talking about it all these years later. Slash was building his self-titled solo album in 2010 around a rotating collection of singers, which is how you end up with Ozzy Osbourne, Fergie, Chris Cornell, Alice Cooper, Slash and Myles Kennedy all living on the same record without anybody pretending they were forming the world’s strangest supergroup. Myles sang “Back from Cali” and “Starlight,” and at that point it could easily have ended there.
Somewhere inside making that record, though, Slash found considerably more than another guest singer.
I can understand why because Myles has one of those voices that can do ridiculous things without making the ridiculous things feel like the entire point. That’s especially useful when you’re standing beside Slash, because subtle guitar playing has never exactly been the business model. He needed somebody who could get over the top of that guitar when necessary without spending every song trying to out-Slash Slash.
He found it. The harder part probably came once they started touring, because now Myles wasn’t only singing the two songs Slash had recorded with him. He was stepping into material from Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, and the rest of Slash’s career, which meant standing inside songs people already had extremely strong opinions about.
Trying to become Axl would have been pointless, though, and I think Myles understood that. He had to respect what made those songs what they were without turning himself into somebody else’s impersonation. That’s a harder balance than it sounds because those vocals are so deeply attached to Guns N’ Roses that changing too much risks losing the thing people came to hear, while copying too closely makes you sound like you’re auditioning for a tribute band.
When I put that beside the beginning of Alter Bridge, there’s actually a pretty interesting connection. Myles had already walked into one situation where the music came with somebody else’s enormous shadow attached to it. Alter Bridge spent years escaping the idea that it was Creed with a different singer, and one of the ways Myles helped them do that was by refusing to sound like the guy who had been there before him.
With Slash, he had to do almost the opposite. This time he wasn’t there to help create distance from the past because Slash’s past was literally part of the show. Myles had to learn how to live inside somebody else’s history without disappearing into it.
The touring worked well enough that the next step stopped being another Slash record with a different singer on every song. By Apocalyptic Love in 2012, this had become Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, with Todd Kerns and Brent Fitz completing the band. Even the ridiculously long name tells you something about the balance they were trying to establish. Slash was still Slash, and obviously his name was going to be out front, but Myles mattered enough to be named beside him, while Todd and Brent were becoming the band around both of them.
More importantly for Myles, he wasn’t simply being handed songs and asked to sing them anymore. He and Slash were writing together, and I think that’s where this stops being a story about Myles being an incredibly useful singer and starts becoming another real part of his musical life.
That’s a pretty big difference. Singing somebody else’s material extremely well still leaves you interpreting something that already exists. Writing together means Slash could bring a riff into the room and Myles could answer it as himself instead of wondering how Axl Rose or Scott Weiland would have answered it twenty years earlier.
You can hear that discovery happening on Apocalyptic Love. “You’re a Lie” and “Standing in the Sun” both have enough Slash DNA that nobody is going to mistake where the guitar came from, but Myles doesn’t sound like a hired voice sitting on top of it. “Anastasia” might be the song where that balance becomes most obvious because Slash gets to be as unmistakably Slash as humanly possible without the entire thing turning into a guitar demonstration with some vocals attached afterward.
It also doesn’t sound like Alter Bridge, which is probably more important than it seems.
Myles could easily have become the thing connecting all of his projects so strongly that eventually everything started sounding like a slightly different version of the same band. Instead, the Slash records pull a different part of him forward. There is more swagger, more room for the giant rock-singer thing he can do, and less need for the atmosphere and progressive movement Alter Bridge increasingly built around him.
Same singer. Different room, and Myles knows which room he’s standing in.
By the time World On Fire arrived in 2014, it was getting considerably harder to treat any of this like a temporary collaboration that happened to work particularly well. The title track comes charging out with exactly the kind of oversized guitar you’d expect from Slash, but the bigger difference across the record is how much more comfortable everybody sounds together. They weren’t trying to figure out whether this combination worked anymore. They’d already spent years proving that onstage.
Todd and Brent deserve some room here too because it’s very easy to shorten this whole thing to Slash and Myles when those are the two names sitting at the front. Todd’s bass and backing vocals become a huge part of the live sound, while Brent’s drumming gives Slash exactly the kind of foundation a guitar player like that needs. You can be loose around the edges when the rhythm section underneath you knows exactly where the floor is.
That becomes especially important live because these shows aren’t built around one neat little period of Slash’s career. They can move from something Slash and Myles wrote six months earlier into a Guns N’ Roses song people have known for decades, and the band has to make that feel like one show instead of several tribute sets accidentally booked on the same stage.
Myles sits right in the middle of that, and I think those years gave him something Alter Bridge never really could because the jobs were so different. Alter Bridge had become a place where he helped determine what the band was. With Slash, part of the job was learning how to step into a history that existed before him without disappearing inside it.
Then he could go back to Alter Bridge where none of those expectations followed him through the door. By the time The Last Hero arrived in 2016, Myles had spent years moving back and forth between these two musical lives without either one swallowing the other.
I think that’s one of the more impressive things about this whole stretch of Myles’ career. He doesn’t seem to need every musical relationship to pull the same thing out of him.
Living The Dream arrived in 2018, eight years after Myles first appeared on Slash’s solo album, and by then I don’t think there was much point in calling this a collaboration anymore. They’d toured extensively, written records together, and built enough of their own catalog that the audience knew these songs instead of simply waiting through them until Slash played something from 1987.
I think that’s an important line for a band like this to cross because Slash could probably spend the rest of his life walking onto stages and playing songs people have loved for thirty years without anybody complaining. If the newer material didn’t matter, the audience would still have Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, and everything else attached to his name.
“Driving Rain” and “Mind Your Manners” had to work as more than excuses to put Slash’s name on another tour poster, and by this point there was enough history behind SMKC that the new material was becoming part of the reason people were there. I’m using SMKC from here because if you’ve made it this far into this post, I think you’ve earned the abbreviation, and I’ve definitely earned not typing Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators another forty times.
Living the Dream also arrived during a year when Myles’ career somehow found another direction to expand. His first solo album finally came out in 2018, which meant he now had Alter Bridge, Slash, and music under his own name all asking for different pieces of him.
That would be enough careers for most people. Myles apparently disagreed.
When 4 arrived in 2022, this particular relationship had lasted long enough that longevity itself became part of the story. More than a decade had passed since Apocalyptic Love, and the idea that Myles was somebody Slash called when he needed a singer didn’t really describe what had happened for a very long time. They had written enough music together and spent enough years onstage beside each other that Myles had become part of the next chapter of Slash’s career rather than simply somebody capable of singing pieces of the previous ones.
That’s where I think the comparison with Mark becomes more interesting than simply saying both of them needed more than one band. They did, obviously, but the reasons and results weren’t the same.
Tremonti grew out of Mark, following parts of himself that Alter Bridge wasn’t built to carry, while also forcing him to find his own voice because there wasn’t another singer standing beside him to do it.
Those are very different things.
The connection I love is where both of them started. Mark’s entire adult musical life had been changed by Creed. Myles had once been the guy in The Mayfield Four opening for Creed while Mark happened to be paying enough attention to remember his voice years later. That singer eventually ended up beside Mark in Alter Bridge and beside Slash in another band that would last more than a decade.
There was absolutely no way anybody standing backstage at one of those old Creed and The Mayfield Four shows could have drawn that line forward.
That’s the kind of thing this post keeps doing to me. The farther we go, the less these careers feel like separate timelines and the more they look like people repeatedly crossing paths, remembering each other, finding another reason to work together, and then ending up somewhere nobody involved could have planned from the beginning.
Neither version of Myles replaces the other because they’re asking different things from him, and I think that’s the part worth carrying forward rather than simply repeating that he had multiple musical homes. Slash brought out something Alter Bridge didn’t. Alter Bridge gave him something Slash couldn’t. The Mayfield Four had already shown us another version of him before either of those existed.
Even with all of that, there were still songs that didn’t completely belong in any of those places. Eventually, Myles was going to do exactly what Mark had done a few years earlier and put his own name on the front of a record, except what came out when he did sounded very different from what Mark had found when he created Tremonti.
YEAR OF THE TIGER 🐯
When Year of the Tiger finally arrived in 2018, Myles Kennedy had already spent years proving he could belong almost anywhere. This was different. For the first time, there wasn’t another band’s name sharing the front of the record with him.
For as much as Myles had already proven by this point, there was still one version of him we hadn’t really heard. We knew what Myles sounded like standing beside Mark. We knew what he sounded like standing beside Slash. We even knew what happened when Myles and Mark started trading guitar parts and vocals inside the same Alter Bridge song.
Year of the Tiger finally removed that equation. When Myles released his first solo album in 2018, he didn’t use the opportunity to make a smaller Alter Bridge record or his own version of the music he’d been making with Slash. He went somewhere much quieter and considerably more personal.
That immediately makes Year of the Tiger different from almost everything else we’ve talked about because Myles wasn’t simply finding another musical outlet. He was finally dealing directly with something he’d been carrying since he was a kid: losing his father when he was four years old.
The title track makes that clear almost immediately. “Year of the Tiger” doesn’t approach his father’s death like something Myles had neatly resolved before walking into the studio.
That gets even more personal with “The Great Beyond,” where Myles imagines what his mother must have been carrying after losing her husband and suddenly having to raise children without him. That’s a perspective he couldn’t possibly have understood when he was four. He had to grow old enough to recognize that the same event he’d spent his life processing had also completely changed somebody else’s life.
“Love Can Only Heal” adds another wrinkle because it was the one song Myles carried over from the earlier version of the album. It survived the complete change in direction because apparently some songs know where they belong before the rest of the record does.
It also revealed another side of his guitar playing, which is easy to overlook when you’re talking about somebody who spends so much time standing next to Mark Tremonti and Slash. Those are two guitarists with such enormous identities that being the other guitar player in either situation would be enough to make almost anyone disappear. On songs like “Haunted by Design” and “Devil on the Wall,” there wasn’t a Mark or Slash waiting to take over when the guitar needed to step forward. Myles could handle that himself, while the rest of the record gave him room to reach for things like banjo, mandolin, and lap steel that weren’t exactly fighting for space on an Alter Bridge album.
Myles had never really disappeared beside either of those guitarists, but Year of the Tiger gave us the chance to hear what happened when there wasn’t another giant musical personality standing beside him. The answer was somebody considerably more restrained than the guy trading enormous moments with Mark or Slash, but not less interesting.
A DYING MACHINE 🦾
By the time Tremonti reached A Dying Machine in 2018, I don’t think there was much left to prove about whether Mark’s third band had enough of an identity to keep going. All I Was gave the heavier side of his writing somewhere to live, while Cauterize and Dust turned that outlet into something that felt increasingly like a band instead of Mark Tremonti making records whenever Alter Bridge left a hole in his schedule. Three albums should have been enough evidence that Tremonti had its own reason to exist.
Apparently Mark looked at all of that and decided the fourth one needed a dystopian science-fiction story. Because of course he did.
A Dying Machine was Tremonti’s first concept album, but I think simply calling it a concept album actually undersells what happened once Mark started following the idea. The story grew beyond the songs and eventually became an entire novel written with John Shirley.
That fascinates me more the longer I spend with this whole ridiculous history because we’ve already talked so much about these guys discovering that one band wasn’t enough to contain everything they wanted to make. Creed wasn’t enough for everything Mark eventually wanted to do, which helped lead us to Alter Bridge and later Tremonti. Alter Bridge wasn’t enough to contain every side of Myles either, which is part of how we’ve ended up following him beside Slash and eventually into his solo career.
A Dying Machine takes that idea somewhere I wasn’t expecting it to go. This time, even the album wasn’t big enough.
Mark had spent his adult life learning how to turn ideas into songs, but the world developing around A Dying Machine kept asking for more than the record could comfortably explain. So he and John Shirley turned it into a book too.
Between Creed, Alter Bridge, Tremonti, and learning how to sing Frank Sinatra properly, Mark apparently still had enough unused creative energy left to build a fictional universe too.
I respect the commitment.
What saves A Dying Machine for me, though, is that none of that homework is required. I can dig into the larger story and get more out of the songs because I understand what is happening around them, or I can completely ignore the book and still have a Tremonti record that works musically.
The story takes place in a future where humans have created artificial beings known as vessels, designed closely enough to people that the difference between something created to serve and something capable of actually feeling becomes increasingly uncomfortable. At the center of it are Brennan and Stella, and what begins as the relationship between a man and something created for a purpose starts pulling at much bigger ideas about obsession, control, possession, love, and what happens when the thing you’ve created begins becoming something you no longer completely control.
That’s a pretty big jump from “You Waste Your Time.”
The science-fiction part gives Mark somewhere to build all of that, but the questions underneath it are what make the story interesting to me. You can invent all the futuristic technology you want, but eventually I need a reason to care about what any of it means. Artificial beings aren’t particularly interesting just because they’re artificial. What gets much messier is asking whether creating something gives you ownership over what it eventually becomes, especially once that something is capable of wanting things you never intended it to want.
Then start confusing ownership with love and everything gets uglier.
That’s where the concept gives the actual music more room instead of becoming something sitting on top of it. “Bringer of War,” “From the Sky,” and the title track can carry the heavier, more threatening parts of this world without every song needing to stop and explain the entire story again. “Trust” and “The First the Last” can live somewhere more melodic and emotional because they’re part of the same larger thing, while “Throw Them to the Lions” can turn around and remind me very quickly that Tremonti hasn’t forgotten how to beat the hell out of a riff just because Mark has a novel now.
What I hear across all of that isn’t really a collection of songs showing off how many different things Tremonti can do. It’s a band that finally has enough range to follow the story wherever it needs to go. The heavy parts can actually be heavy, but the quieter or more emotional pieces don’t feel like intermissions where everybody waits for Mark to turn the guitars back up. That’s a huge difference from where Tremonti started, and I don’t think A Dying Machine would have worked nearly as well if Mark had tried making it several years earlier.
His voice is a big reason why. By this point, Mark wasn’t simply getting better at singing heavy Tremonti songs. He’d become comfortable enough with his voice to carry multiple characters and move through the emotional range of a larger story without constantly trying to overpower everything around him. Go all the way back to All I Was, and you can hear somebody learning how to front his own band. By Cauterize and Dust, that voice was becoming much more natural. A Dying Machine asked much more of it because Mark wasn’t just trying to sell twelve separate songs anymore. He had to help hold the same world together from one end of the album to the other.
“The First the Last” is one of the places where that growth becomes especially obvious to me because the song needs something completely different from Mark than “Bringer of War” does. Earlier, Tremonti could always prove itself by getting heavier. This version didn’t need to prove that anymore, which gave Mark room to become more vulnerable without making it feel like he’d wandered onto somebody else’s record.
Then there’s “Take You With Me,” which is also a pretty good reminder that apparently nobody has figured out how to stop Mark Tremonti from writing a giant melody no matter how much metal you surround him with. It’s fast and heavy enough to sit comfortably on this album, but underneath it is still the guy who has spent decades understanding what makes people want to sing something back at him.
I think that’s one of the reasons Tremonti became more interesting instead of less interesting as the records accumulated. There are heavier bands, faster bands, and people who can make guitar playing more technical if technical is the only thing we’re measuring. Mark’s advantage has always been that the guy obsessed with riffs is also the guy who understands songs. He didn’t have to throw one of those things away to prove the other one was legitimate.
Eric Friedman had become even more important to making all of that possible by this point. Wolfgang wasn’t part of the band anymore, and Eric handled bass on the record in addition to the guitar and vocal work he’d already been doing, which makes A Dying Machine feel even more like Mark, Eric, and Garrett finding out what this particular version of Tremonti could do together. Eric had been around long enough that calling him the other guitar player was already selling his role short, while Garrett could move underneath all the changes in weight and atmosphere without making it sound like Tremonti needed a different rhythm section depending on which part of the story they were telling.
That’s important on a concept record because the story gives you a reason to change shape. The music can’t spend an entire album in the same emotional place if the characters aren’t staying there either. Tremonti needed enough range to move with what was happening without losing the thing that made all of it sound like the same band, and by album four they had enough history together to do that.
The other freedom Mark found here was being able to write from somewhere outside himself. He’d obviously written stories and imagined perspectives before, but building an entire fictional world changes the relationship between the writer and the person speaking through a song. Mark didn’t always have to ask what he would say anymore. He could ask what Brennan would say, what Stella might feel or what made sense for somebody who only existed inside this world, and then find the real emotion underneath that fictional perspective.
I think that’s much more interesting than simply saying Mark wrote a concept album.
Fiction gave him distance, but it didn’t remove the human part. If anything, creating characters gave him another way to get at things like control, fear, obsession, and love without having to pretend every thought belonged directly to Mark Tremonti. The people weren’t real, but whatever makes us recognize ourselves inside them still had to be.
Then the novel could go into all the places where a song would have fallen apart trying to explain itself.
That’s the part of the album-and-novel relationship I keep coming back to. The book isn’t interesting because Mark apparently decided being in several bands wasn’t keeping him busy enough. It’s interesting because he ran into the limitations of the thing he already knew how to do. Songs are incredibly good at making you feel something. They’re not always particularly good at explaining the political structure of a fictional future, the history of a technology, or why somebody did something three chapters ago.
Rather than turning the record into exposition, Mark let the songs do what songs are good at and let the novel carry what they couldn’t.
For somebody whose entire career had been built around writing music, there’s something I really like about that. He didn’t protect the format simply because it was the format he knew. He followed the idea until it told him what else it needed.
That also says a lot about how far Tremonti had come since All I Was. This wasn’t the band where Mark dumped whatever didn’t fit on the other records anymore. It had its own language, its own people, its own audience, and now apparently its own fictional universe.
There really isn’t much confusion about where A Dying Machine belongs.
The timing makes all of this even more interesting because 2018 was also the year Myles released Year of the Tiger. We keep finding these moments where two branches of the family tree are growing at exactly the same time, but in completely different directions.
Both men had reached a point where Alter Bridge couldn’t possibly contain every piece of music they wanted to make, but they weren’t leaving that room looking for the same thing. Mark went heavier, more technical, and eventually so far into the weeds that he built an entire science-fiction universe. Myles stripped almost everything away until he could sit directly in front of the most personal story he’d ever tried to tell.
That’s what keeps me from flattening their careers into the same story simply because both men were expanding beyond Alter Bridge. Mark had built another band and then expanded that band’s album into another medium. Myles had removed the band completely and used the space to tell a story he’d been carrying since childhood.
Same tree. Completely different branches.
THE SPACE BETWEEN THE SHADOWS 🌓
By the time Scott released The Space Between the Shadows in 2019, six years had passed since Proof of Life, and I think those six years matter as much to this record as anything actually recorded on it. The Scott who made Proof of Life was already writing openly about survival, self-destruction, and wanting something better, but as we’ve already seen, recognizing those things and actually finding your way through them are not remotely the same thing. Scott still had one of the worst periods of his life ahead of him when Proof of Life came out, which makes it difficult to hear that record now as the beginning of some clean recovery story that simply continued in a straight line until we arrived here.
Everything Scott went through after Proof of Life, and the much longer process of getting healthier that followed, makes The Space Between the Shadows feel less like another chapter in the same struggle and more like somebody finally learning how to live differently inside his own life.
I actually think treating The Space Between the Shadows as the record where Scott finally figured everything out would cheapen some of what makes it interesting. Recovery stories become way too neat when we tell them backward. Once we know somebody eventually got healthier, it’s tempting to turn every earlier step into obvious progress toward the ending.
“World I Used to Know” is a pretty fitting place to begin because Scott wasn’t returning to the same world he’d left. Creed wasn’t active. Mark, Brian, and Flip had spent years building Alter Bridge into something enormous in its own right; Mark had Tremonti, and Myles had Slash and had released his first solo record. Scott’s own career had continued too, including the period with Art of Anarchy that I’m not going to spend much time on because I don’t think it changes the larger story we’re following here nearly as much as what happened in Scott’s personal life. The world around him really had changed, but more importantly, so had Scott.
That’s where the title The Space Between the Shadows starts making sense to me. Scott had spent a lot of his career writing about darkness and light in one form or another. Faith and doubt. Destruction and survival. Shame and forgiveness. This record lives in the space between those poles instead of constantly trying to choose one.
If Proof of Life sometimes sounds like somebody trying desperately to convince himself there is another side to what he’s going through, The Space Between the Shadows sounds more comfortable admitting that both things can exist at once. You can be grateful and still hurt. You can forgive somebody without pretending they didn’t damage you. You can understand your own failures without deciding those failures are the only true things about you.
“Name” is probably one of the places where that becomes hardest for me to ignore. Scott has written about fathers and family before, but there’s a different weight to hearing him work through the legacy of his own father while thinking about what he’s passing to his children. Once you’ve followed enough of Scott’s history, the idea of inheritance gets complicated very quickly because he knows firsthand that what parents give their children isn’t limited to the good things they intended to give them. He’s looking backward at what he inherited while also being a father looking in the other direction, which changes the question from simply what did I get from the person before me? To what am I handing forward to the people who come after me?
I think that’s part of a larger change in Scott’s writing by this point. There seems to be more room for responsibility without turning responsibility into endless punishment. Earlier parts of his story could swing between self-destruction and the kind of enormous declarations you’d expect from somebody desperately trying to get to the other side of it. Here, there’s more room for the possibility that accountability can mean understanding what you’ve done, living with the consequences, and still deciding you’re allowed to keep becoming somebody else.
That’s a much harder thing to write about than redemption if we’re being truthful about it, because redemption makes a great ending while real life has the annoying habit of continuing afterward. Scott still had to wake up the next morning, still had a marriage and children, and still had a career carrying all of the history attached to Creed, whether Creed itself was currently doing anything or not. He also had people who remembered the worst moments because some of those moments happened very publicly, and getting healthier didn’t magically erase any of them. The Space Between the Shadows doesn’t get to erase that history either, but I don’t hear Scott asking it to.
“Purpose for Pain” is probably the clearest example of where his writing had arrived because it doesn’t require pain to become good simply because you survived it. The more interesting question is what you’re going to do with it afterward. Scott had accumulated more than enough by 2019, some of it done to him, some of it created by his own choices, and some of it tied to things he didn’t fully understand about himself until much later. Those things can all exist in the same story without one being used to erase the others.
I think that’s especially important when we talk about Scott because his story becomes too simple very quickly if we decide he has to be either the victim or the problem. He was capable of hurting people while also being somebody who was hurting himself, and neither truth makes the other disappear. Understanding his mental health struggles doesn’t require pretending the consequences weren’t real, just like acknowledging those consequences doesn’t mean we have to ignore what was happening underneath them. Real life unfortunately doesn’t give us a convenient scoreboard for deciding which part gets to count more.
That’s also why I don’t think understanding Scott’s mental health should become an explanation we use to flatten everything that happened before it. Having better information about what he had been dealing with gave context to behavior that had sometimes seemed impossible to understand from the outside, but context and absolution aren’t the same thing. Addiction was still real, his choices were still real, and the effects those choices had on other people didn’t disappear once Scott had better tools for understanding himself. What changed was his ability to recognize more of what was happening before his life reached the point of coming apart again, and learning how to do that consistently was always going to take time.
What matters here is that the Scott making The Space Between the Shadows wasn’t simply an older version of the person who had made Proof of Life. He had more tools, more support, and more distance from some of the chaos. That doesn’t make the record automatically better. It makes it different.
Before we get there, though, The Space Between the Shadows still has plenty of its own ground to cover. “Heaven in Me” is another one I keep coming back to because faith has always been one of the easiest things for people to misunderstand about Scott.
People had been projecting an entire Christian-rock identity onto Creed almost from the beginning because Scott wrote openly about God, doubt, salvation, and spiritual questions, but those songs were rarely as simple as the label people wanted to put on them. The Space Between the Shadows continues that tension from a much older Scott who had lived through far more than the person writing the first Creed records. Faith doesn’t have to solve everything here for it to matter, and I think that’s probably closer to how belief actually works for a lot of people anyway.
There is a version of spirituality that wants an answer to every question, while another version becomes more comfortable admitting some questions are probably going to stay questions. Scott’s writing has always lived somewhere between belief and wrestling with belief, and surviving everything he’d survived didn’t suddenly remove the wrestling. If anything, I think having lived through enough moments where faith didn’t magically prevent everything from falling apart gives those questions more weight instead of less.
“Survivor” could have been an incredibly easy song to turn into the victory lap, especially on a record arriving after everything Scott had publicly survived. The rest of The Space Between the Shadows makes that reading harder for me because survival here doesn’t sound like the end of anything. It means he made it far enough to have another chance at some of the things he nearly lost, and another chance comes with the uncomfortable responsibility of figuring out what you’re going to do with it once everybody stops congratulating you for making it through.
That’s where family becomes especially important to this period of Scott’s life. He wasn’t trying to rebuild in isolation, and Jaclyn and their children were part of what recovery actually had to mean once it moved beyond interviews, songs, and public declarations. Staying healthy isn’t one giant decision somebody makes at the emotional climax of the story. It’s a collection of much less exciting decisions, difficult conversations, routines, treatment, and choices that have to keep happening long after everybody else stops watching. I think The Space Between the Shadows understands more of that than Scott’s earlier records could have because by 2019 he’d actually had to live it.
Musically, there’s still the giant Scott Stapp voice because he didn’t suddenly decide subtle bedroom folk was the answer to everything. When Scott believes something deserves to be big, he’s going to make sure the person three rooms away knows about it too, and that’s part of why his voice worked so well with Creed in the first place. His solo music has never really tried to pretend that instinct isn’t there, but what changed wasn’t Scott becoming smaller, because I’m not sure Scott Stapp has ever had much interest in doing anything emotionally small. He sounds more comfortable knowing when that size is useful, which lets those bigger moments carry their weight without asking every song to live at the same intensity.
That’s one of the musical differences I hear when I put The Great Divide, Proof of Life and The Space Between the Shadows beside each other. The first record needed to establish that Scott could exist outside Creed. The second sounds like somebody actively trying to survive. This one doesn’t seem as interested in proving either thing.
That’s a much more believable version of recovery to me. Scott still sounds like Scott. The faith is still there, the enormous voice is definitely still there, and the tendency to reach for huge emotional ideas isn’t going anywhere. Getting healthier didn’t require throwing those pieces of himself away. What mattered was changing his relationship with them, especially the darker ones, and whether they still got to decide what happened next.
He doesn’t have to let the shadows disappear to stop living entirely inside them, and that’s probably where the album title lands hardest for me. The Space Between the Shadows isn’t a place where darkness has been defeated. It’s a place where darkness isn’t the only thing in the room anymore.
For Scott, getting to that room mattered because his story wasn’t remotely finished. There would be another solo record years later, while Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip continued building everything happening on their side of this increasingly ridiculous musical family. Alter Bridge would keep moving, Tremonti would keep changing, Myles would keep discovering what his own name sounded like on the front of a record, and Mark would eventually find a use for his voice that nobody listening to All I Was could have seen coming.
Beyond all of that was Creed, but I don’t think the most important thing about what happened next, but I don’t think the most important thing about what happened next is that four guys eventually realized people would still pay a lot of money to hear them play “Higher.” Long before anybody knew exactly what a Creed reunion could become, there had to be some version of Mark, Scott, Brian, and Flip capable of being in each other’s lives again without immediately trying to turn that relationship into a business plan.
Scott getting healthier mattered whether Creed ever played another show or not. When those relationships finally started changing, they weren’t beginning with an album, a cruise, or an arena full of people waiting for the opening notes of “Are You Ready?” They were beginning with each other, and considering everything it had taken to get the four of them there, I think that’s probably the only reason anything beyond that had a chance of working.
WALK THE SKY 🌌
While Scott was finding a different kind of stability on The Space Between the Shadows, Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip were getting ready to make another left turn with Alter Bridge. After The Last Hero, they had every reason to keep leaning into the giant guitars, long arrangements, and increasingly progressive side of the band.
They could have made that record. I’m sure I would have liked it too. Instead, Walk the Sky starts introducing electronic textures and a little more atmosphere into places where another giant riff could have gone.
“One Life” makes that clear before the album really starts. It’s more of an introduction than a traditional opening song, but those electronic textures immediately tell you something different is happening before “Wouldn’t You Rather” arrives and gives you much more familiar ground underneath your feet. I like that sequence because the album doesn’t ask you to choose between the new things and the Alter Bridge you already know. It starts showing how they can exist in the same place.
That balance runs through a lot of Walk the Sky. The electronic influence gets talked about because it’s the obvious new ingredient, but I don’t hear the record as Alter Bridge suddenly becoming an electronic band. I hear them using another color because they finally had room for it.
“Godspeed” is probably one of the best examples of that for me because the electronic elements don’t feel pasted onto an Alter Bridge song to prove the band discovered synthesizers. They’re part of what gives the song its movement and atmosphere, while the melody is still unmistakably something this band would write. There’s a warmth to it that becomes even more affecting once you understand the loss underneath the song, and I think that’s where Walk the Sky works best. The new sounds aren’t interesting simply because they’re new. They’re useful because they give Alter Bridge another way to get somewhere emotionally.
That’s really all I need from the experimentation here. I don’t need Alter Bridge to burn everything down every album just to prove they’re evolving, and I definitely don’t want them chasing whatever sound happens to be popular that year. Give me enough new ingredients that the same four people can surprise me.
“In the Deep” leans into that atmosphere in another way, while “Native Son” lets more of the heavier side come back through. Then you get something like “Pay No Mind,” where the synth influence becomes much harder to treat as decoration. What I like is that Mark doesn’t seem threatened by any of it. This is a guy whose guitar tone has been one of the defining pieces of every band he’s been in, and instead of making sure the guitar owns every inch of the song, he’s willing to let another texture sit beside it when that’s what makes the idea work.
That probably says something about where Mark was creatively by this point too. Tremonti had given him another band where he could be as guitar-heavy as he wanted, while Alter Bridge had already proven it could survive becoming more complicated. He didn’t have to make one band carry every part of him anymore.
Myles had been stretching himself in several directions. Year of the Tiger had stripped his music back and given him somewhere to write from a much more personal place, while years beside Slash had made him comfortable living inside a completely different kind of rock band.
The same thing had happened inside Alter Bridge itself. The Myles who joined the band for One Day Remains was stepping into songs Mark had largely written already. The Myles on Walk the Sky had spent fifteen years becoming one of the people who defined what the band could sound like.
I think that’s part of why the experimentation feels natural instead of nervous. Nobody sounds like they’re trying to reinvent Alter Bridge because the old version stopped working. They sound like they’re curious about what else this version can do.
Brian and Flip matter enormously in making that possible because somebody still has to make all of these new textures feel attached to the band we’ve been following since 2004. Brian’s bass gives the songs movement underneath arrangements that could easily become crowded, while Flip remains one of those drummers who seems perfectly comfortable letting the song decide how much of him it actually needs. We’ve already talked about the restraint both of them bring to Alter Bridge, and I hear Walk the Sky as another place where that becomes useful. If every new layer had been met with everybody else adding another layer of their own, this record could have become exhausting very quickly.
Instead, there is room. That’s probably one of the bigger differences between Walk the Sky and some of the records before it. Fortress often found its power by stacking enormous musical ideas on top of one another. Walk the Sky can be just as big while leaving more air inside the arrangement.
Then there’s “Forever Falling,” which gives us another important point in the story we’ve been following with Mark’s voice. “Waters Rising” had already shown that Mark taking a lead vocal inside Alter Bridge didn’t need to be treated like a novelty, but several Tremonti albums later, “Forever Falling” arrived with a Mark who was a long way removed from the guy figuring himself out on All I Was. He sounds like somebody who fronts another band because that’s exactly what he’d spent years doing by then.
I like what that gives Alter Bridge because Mark singing doesn’t have to mean Myles sits the song out. Their voices are different enough that changing the lead singer changes the shape of the song, while still leaving room for both of them to be part of it.
That’s a pretty remarkable progression when you trace it all the way back. Mark spent the beginning of this story writing beside Scott, then formed Alter Bridge with Myles handling the lead vocals, then built Tremonti because he needed somewhere to put music neither band could hold. Now his voice was becoming important enough that an Alter Bridge album could make room for him at the front without anybody wondering why the singer had disappeared.
Knowing where Mark’s voice eventually goes makes all of that even stranger, but Sinatra can wait a little longer.
“Dying Light” is where Walk the Sky comes together most clearly for me because it feels like the band taking everything they’d been experimenting with and making it sound completely natural. The electronics are there, the atmosphere is there, the giant guitars are definitely still there, but none of them feel like the point anymore.
There’s also something about that title that fits this period of the larger story without us needing to pretend the song was written about everybody’s interconnected careers. So much of what we’ve been following has involved people learning how to live with things ending, changing, or becoming something they never expected. Creed had already ended twice in different ways. Alter Bridge existed because of the first one and survived the second reunion without being swallowed by it. Mark had another band, Myles had another band and a solo career, Scott had rebuilt enough of his own life to make The Space Between the Shadows, and Brian and Flip had spent years quietly being part of several of the connections holding this whole thing together.
None of that made Alter Bridge feel less permanent by 2019. If anything, Walk the Sky is interesting to me because permanence hadn’t turned into predictability. They’d earned the right to make the obvious Alter Bridge record if they wanted to, and apparently nobody did.
Apparently nobody did. I think that’s healthier than constantly trying to make every new record the biggest statement of your career. Walk the Sky doesn’t need to replace Blackbird or out-heavy Fortress. It needed to give the four people making it somewhere interesting to go next.
By 2019, all of those outside musical lives were simply part of what Alter Bridge was. Nobody needed this band to contain every idea anymore, and that left these four guys free to make the record they were actually interested in making.
Walk the Sky was that record in 2019, and I think its willingness to change the furniture without moving out of the house is a big part of why it still works for me.
THE IDES OF MARCH 💧
If Year of the Tiger answered the question of whether Myles Kennedy actually needed a solo career, The Ides of March answered a harder one.
I think that’s an important distinction because Year of the Tiger had such a clear reason to exist. Myles had spent years carrying the story of losing his father before he was old enough to understand what had actually happened, and eventually there was an album he needed to make out of that.
He plugged back in, but not so completely that everything he’d discovered on Year of the Tiger disappeared. The acoustic guitar, lap steel, and some of those rootsier pieces were still part of the vocabulary. He simply had electric guitars, bigger arrangements, and more room to stretch as a player now.
That’s something I think gets lost ridiculously easily when somebody can sing like Myles Kennedy. We’ve spent so much time talking about the voice because how the hell could we not, but the guitar player standing underneath it is ridiculous too. Take away Slash and Mark, put Myles in a room with his own songs, and suddenly there is nowhere for that part of him to hide.
That’s part of why I don’t hear this as Myles making his version of an Alter Bridge record without Mark. If anything, having his own name on the front permitted him to stop asking whether an idea belonged somewhere else first.
The circumstances around the record gave him more time to explore that than he was used to having, too. Myles had spent years bouncing between Alter Bridge, Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators, and everything else that came with being him. Suddenly touring stopped, everybody went home, and there was nowhere else he needed to be.
The pandemic inevitably ended up all over The Ides of March, but I don’t think reducing it to Myles’ pandemic record really gets at what makes it work. He was writing about a world that suddenly felt unstable, obviously, but also about the way uncertainty amplifies whatever was already rattling around inside your head.
For somebody with a worried mind, that’s a hell of a lot of material.
“In Stride” is probably the easiest way into that because underneath the swagger and slide guitar is somebody trying not to let every possible disaster become the disaster. The circumstances of 2020 gave that instinct something particularly enormous to grab onto, but the feeling underneath it is much more familiar than lockdown. It’s really easy to tell somebody else not to imagine every possible way things could go wrong. It’s a hell of a lot harder when you’re the person lying awake doing exactly that, which makes “In Stride” feel less like Myles handing the rest of us advice and more like something he needs to hear too.
That distinction matters to me because otherwise songs about keeping things in perspective can become inspirational posters pretty quickly. “In Stride” works because I don’t hear somebody standing safely on the other side telling everyone else to calm down. I hear somebody looking at the same uncertainty and trying to remind himself that panicking isn’t going to give him any more control over what happens next.
The title track takes that uncertainty somewhere considerably bigger. “The Ides of March” stretches past seven minutes, but it doesn’t feel like Myles decided his solo record needed an epic because Alter Bridge gets to have them. The song grew into that size because the idea kept opening up, and the warning already built into the phrase The Ides of March fits almost too perfectly with a period where basically the entire world seemed to be waiting to find out what terrible thing might happen next.
There’s another piece of that song’s history I love because it says a lot about how seriously Myles had started treating this solo identity. “The Ides of March” became the first solo song he ever played live, debuting it at a show in 2020 before the album was released.
That’s a much more meaningful marker of Myles having a solo career than simply releasing album number two. He’d reached the point where his own music had enough of an identity that he could put it beside Alter Bridge and Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators on a setlist and trust it to stand there.
I also like that “The Ides of March” gives us so much of Myles the guitar player. That part of him has been sitting in plain sight for years, especially if you’ve spent enough time with Alter Bridge, but his voice is so ridiculous that it’s easy for the guitar to become the second thing people talk about.
That doesn’t mean every song suddenly needs to become an excuse for a solo. The acoustic side of Myles is still here because abandoning everything that made Year of the Tiger work would have been just as limiting as repeating it.
“Sifting Through the Fire” finds another version of that combination. Musically, it pulls from a Southern-rock direction that gives Myles somewhere different to play, while underneath it he’s wrestling with the amount of information everybody was consuming and how difficult it had become to tell whether any of us were actually learning something or simply finding another person willing to tell us what we already wanted to hear. Unfortunately, that part hasn’t exactly aged out of relevance.
What I like about the idea is that it doesn’t require Myles to stand outside the problem and point at everybody else. None of us is completely immune to an echo chamber, especially now that an algorithm can quietly build one around us while we’re busy insisting we’re independent thinkers.
That uncertainty runs through a lot of the album without making every song feel like another verse of the same argument. “Get Along” reaches toward division and the apparently radical idea that people might have to figure out how to exist beside each other even when they disagree. “Moonshot” comes from a completely different kind of frustration, the strange realization that something as ordinary as getting ready to leave for a show had suddenly become something worth missing. When your life has been built around constantly moving from one stage and one project to another, being forced to stop probably changes your relationship with things you hadn’t even realized had become routine.
That’s another reason I think this album matters in Myles’ larger story. For years we’ve been following somebody who was almost always going somewhere. Alter Bridge needed him. Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators needed him. Touring meant another city, another stage, and another set of songs waiting for him. Then suddenly the world told everybody to stay home.
Apparently there was quite a bit happening in there.
By the time “Worried Mind” closes the record, that title almost feels like it could describe the thread running through the entire thing. There is anxiety all over The Ides of March, but I don’t hear Myles surrendering to it. He seems much more interested in what happens once you’ve recognized the fear and whether you’re going to let it decide how you see everybody and everything around you.
That’s where I think the difference between Year of the Tiger and The Ides of March becomes much bigger than acoustic versus electric. Year of the Tiger is built around a specific wound and the long shadow it left over one family. The Ides of March is somebody looking outward and realizing the entire world gives him plenty to worry about too.
The musical change follows the emotional one. Year of the Tiger needed intimacy, space, and the feeling of Myles sitting close enough to the material that you could almost hear him thinking through it. The Ides of March lets him get louder, stranger, and more electric without losing that closeness.
I think that’s where Myles’ solo career finally becomes something bigger than the album he needed to make about his father. He’d already proven he could exist without Alter Bridge or Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators around him. The Ides of March proved there were enough reasons for him to keep doing it.
Two albums in, Myles Kennedy under his own name wasn’t an experiment happening in whatever space Alter Bridge and Slash happened to leave available. It was another real branch.
MARCHING IN TIME ⏰
Mark reached 2021 from another direction. Tremonti released Marching in Time in September, the band’s fifth album and its first after A Dying Machine, turning Mark’s side project into something ambitious enough to support an entire fictional world around it. That record proved how far he could push the band conceptually. Marching in Time didn’t try to outdo it.
I think Marching in Time is an important record in that evolution because it shows how much larger the band’s vocabulary had become. The speed and weight were still there
That balance matters because Mark has always been more melodic than the word metal sometimes allows people to assume. You can trace that instinct all the way back through Creed, but Tremonti permits him to put it beside much more aggressive playing without asking either side to compromise. By the fifth record, those things don’t feel like opposite ends of the band anymore. They’re simply part of the same language, and Eric Friedman and the rest of Tremonti had spent enough years around Mark to know how to move between them with him.
The title track is where the album becomes more personal for me. Mark wrote “Marching in Time” from the perspective of a father bringing a child into a world that felt particularly uncertain during the pandemic, and that gives the song a different kind of weight than the fictional world he’d built around A Dying Machine. He wasn’t trying to make an entire pandemic record, which I think was the right choice. Instead, that one experience found its way into a much more universal fear: how do you raise somebody you love in a world you can’t control without allowing everything ugly about that world to change who they become?
There was also something interesting happening with Mark’s voice by this point. Earlier Tremonti records often found him pushing toward the higher, more aggressive parts of his range, but Marching in Time lets more of his natural lower voice into the room. That’s especially noticeable in the title track, and it becomes even more interesting once you know what he had already begun studying away from rock. Mark’s fascination with Frank Sinatra wasn’t some random idea that appeared after this album. He had been studying Sinatra’s phrasing and vocal approach, and that work was already changing the way he thought about his own voice before most people knew where it was going to lead.
That’s one of those connections I love in this entire story because none of these projects really stay isolated from one another. Mark learns something about singing by fronting Tremonti, starts studying Sinatra because he wants to understand another kind of vocalist, and then some of that work changes the way he sings Tremonti. Later, he would talk about the Sinatra experience continuing to affect his vocals on The End Will Show Us How. The guy who spent the first part of this story standing beside Scott Stapp and then Myles Kennedy had become a singer with enough confidence to start learning from one of the most famous voices of the twentieth century and actually apply those lessons to heavy music.
Marching in Time also arrived after the pandemic had interrupted the machinery that had kept all of these musicians moving for decades. I don’t think we need to turn the record into a pandemic album because that’s too simple, but something is fitting about a record so concerned with time arriving after everybody had been forced to experience time differently for a while.
By 2021, Tremonti had become one of the places where Mark could keep discovering parts of himself his other bands had never required him to explore. This time, one of those discoveries was already pulling him toward something almost nobody following the guy from Creed could have predicted: from speed-metal riffs and down-tuned guitars toward Frank Sinatra and a seventeen-piece orchestra.
MARK TREMONTI SINGS FRANK SINATRA 🎤
Then, because apparently Creed, Alter Bridge, and Tremonti weren’t enough directions for one person, Mark decided to become Frank Sinatra.
Calling it a covers record doesn’t really explain what Mark was trying to do. He wasn’t taking Sinatra songs and rebuilding them as Tremonti songs. He wanted to sing the arrangements as faithfully as possible, working with surviving members of Sinatra’s orchestra and treating the entire thing with considerably more seriousness than a rock-guy-does-standards novelty project required.
The reason he went that far matters even more. Mark and his family learned that his daughter Stella would be born with Down syndrome, and the Sinatra project became the beginning of Take a Chance for Charity, with the original album benefiting the National Down Syndrome Society. Suddenly this strange left turn in Mark’s career had a purpose much larger than proving he could sing standards. Sinatra himself had a long history of charitable work, and Mark took music he genuinely loved and used it to build something around his daughter that could reach other families too.
I think that changes the way this whole chapter lands. Mark wasn’t searching for another genre to conquer because three bands somehow weren’t enough. He was learning something difficult because it mattered to him personally, then finding a way to make that work useful beyond himself. The fact that he turned out to be remarkably good at it is almost secondary, although hearing the record for the first time makes it pretty hard to ignore how far his voice had come since All I Was.
It didn’t stop with one Sinatra album either. In 2023, he released Christmas Classics New & Old, continuing to work in that same musical world instead of treating the first record as a one-time experiment.
The Sinatra work also kept moving after Creed returned. Mark has continued performing the material live, including orchestral shows built around the Sinatra catalog, and the project has remained connected to the charitable work that inspired it in the first place.
That continued life is important because I don’t want this part of the post to read like Mark did a Sinatra record in 2022, made a Christmas album the next year, and then went back to the guitars. The project became part of his musical life rather than a detour from it.
More importantly, the lessons followed him back into his other music. Mark has talked about the Sinatra work changing his approach to singing, particularly becoming more comfortable in his lower register instead of always reaching for the higher notes he’d relied on through much of Tremonti.
That’s what makes the Sinatra chapter so much more than the weirdest bullet point on Mark’s résumé. Tremonti had already forced him to become a singer, but this taught him how to use that voice differently.
The guy returning to Creed in this era wasn’t simply Creed‘s guitarist anymore. He was one of the creative forces behind Alter Bridge, the singer and guitarist leading Tremonti, somebody who had built a concept album into a novel, learned to front an orchestra singing Sinatra, made a traditional Christmas record, and created a charitable initiative inspired by his daughter. None of those things required him to stop being the person who wrote “Higher.” They just made “the guitarist from Creed“ an increasingly incomplete way to describe him.
PAWNS & KINGS 👑
The same year also brought Alter Bridge‘s Pawns & Kings. Putting that record beside Mark’s Sinatra work is almost funny because it shows just how little sense it makes by this point to describe any of these musicians through one musical identity. Mark could spend part of this period studying the restraint and phrasing required to stand in front of an orchestra and then return to Alter Bridge for one of the heavier, more expansive records the band had made.
Pawns & Kings arrived in 2022, nearly twenty years after One Day Remains, and by this point there was almost nothing useful left in comparing Alter Bridge to Creed beyond understanding the people connecting them. “This Is War” opens with the kind of scale Alter Bridge had spent years learning how to control, “Silver Tongue” is heavier and more immediate, and “Sin After Sin” gives the band room to stretch without losing the song underneath everything happening inside it. Then there’s “Fable of the Silent Son,” a song long enough and complicated enough that the version of Alter Bridge making One Day Remains probably couldn’t have made it yet, not because those musicians lacked the ability, but because they hadn’t spent nearly two decades learning how to move around one another.
That last part belongs to Brian and Flip just as much as it belongs to Mark and Myles. It’s easy to hear an Alter Bridge song this far into the band’s career and immediately focus on the guitars because Mark and Myles have become such a recognizable partnership, but Brian and Flip are the reason those guitars can keep getting larger without the songs losing their center. Brian has always had an instinct for playing around the vocal melody rather than simply following the guitar, which gives his bass room to become its own voice without fighting everything above it. On a record with this much movement, that matters. He can lock into the heavier rhythmic parts, then open space around Myles when the song needs to breathe, and after all these years with both Mark and Flip, those choices feel less like somebody adding bass to a finished idea and more like part of the way Alter Bridge thinks.
Flip gets a similar opportunity on Pawns & Kings. The record pulls some of the extra production back and lets the four musicians feel more present in the room, which makes the rhythm section harder to overlook. A song like “Fable of the Silent Son” can move through all of its twists and sections because Flip knows when complexity helps and when the best thing he can do is keep the song grounded while everything around him changes. By this point, he and Brian had spent decades together across two bands, but Alter Bridge had asked them to become a very different rhythm section than Creed originally did. The heavier progressive side, odd turns, longer arrangements, and the way Mark and Myles trade space all require more from underneath them, and Brian and Flip grew into that language right alongside everybody else.
I think that’s one of the reasons the shared personnel between Creed and Alter Bridge becomes less interesting musically the longer both catalogs get. Brian Marshall and Scott Phillips don’t simply sound the same in two different bands because the songs aren’t asking the same things from them. Creed gives them one kind of space. Alter Bridge gives them another. The fact that they can return to “Higher” or “My Sacrifice” and understand exactly what those songs need, then turn around and hold together something like “Fable of the Silent Son,” says more about them than treating either guy as the rhythm section behind the more visible names ever could.
The title track closes Pawns & Kings with another long-form piece, while “Stay” gives Mark another lead vocal inside Alter Bridge. That carries more weight after following Tremonti through this chronology because Mark singing an Alter Bridge song doesn’t feel like the guitarist getting a turn anymore. By 2022, he had spent a decade fronting another band, and his voice had become another legitimate option inside Alter Bridge rather than a surprise when it appeared.
By this point, Alter Bridge didn’t need anybody to prove they were committed to it by becoming less of themselves somewhere else. Twenty years earlier, Creed hadn’t really known how to make that kind of space. By the end of 2022, though, something was beginning to change around Creed too.
MENDING FENCES 🪜
For years, the easiest way to talk about another Creed reunion was to ask whether Scott, Mark, Brian, and Flip wanted to make another record or play another tour. I think that puts the cart before the horse. Before Creed could become a band again, these guys needed to reach a point where being in one another’s lives didn’t automatically mean reopening everything that had gone wrong the last time they tried.
That process didn’t begin with a tour announcement, and I think that’s one of the most important differences between this reunion and the one in 2009. Scott’s recovery was obviously part of it, but so was everybody simply having enough life outside Creed to gain perspective on what Creed had once done to their relationships. Mark had Alter Bridge, Tremonti, and an entirely unexpected Sinatra world. Brian and Flip had spent nearly two decades helping turn Alter Bridge into a career of its own. Scott had rebuilt his solo career while doing much harder work away from the stage. None of them needed Creed to solve a problem in their lives anymore, and that gave them room to figure out whether they actually wanted the people back before deciding whether they wanted the band back.
That distinction matters to me because reconciliation happened before anybody knew what the commercial reward for it might be. They didn’t have sold-out amphitheaters proving there was enormous money waiting on the other side. They didn’t know Summer of ’99 was going to become one of the biggest rock stories of the next several years because Summer of ’99 didn’t exist yet. The relationships had to improve without that evidence. Scott and Mark in particular had spent years carrying the most visible version of Creed‘s damaged history, but Brian and Flip had their own experiences inside it too. Brian had already lived through leaving Creed once, returning years later and watching the second attempt stall. Flip had been the person who kept moving with Mark through Alter Bridge while still sharing an entire earlier life with Scott. None of these relationships could be reduced to Scott and Mark finally deciding they were okay.
I think Brian and Flip also matter here because they were coming back to Creed from a position neither Scott nor Mark shared. They had built an entire second musical life with Mark, and bringing Creed back meant reopening a relationship with Scott without sacrificing the band they’d spent twenty years building with Myles. There was no reason they had to do that. Alter Bridge was established, successful, and creatively alive. Brian and Flip weren’t returning because they needed a band to play in, which makes their willingness to come back to Creed feel more meaningful to me. It had to be something they wanted to reclaim rather than something they needed professionally.
None of that required pretending the old history hadn’t happened. There was too much of it, and each of them had experienced the collapse from a slightly different place. Scott’s struggles affected people around him, while the other three carried their own reasons for being hurt, angry, or cautious about trying again. Time alone doesn’t fix any of that. What time can do is create enough distance for people to decide whether the worst years of a relationship are going to be the only years they’re allowed to remember.
Eventually those repaired relationships made a different question possible. Not whether they could erase what happened, and not whether everybody could become the people they had been twenty years earlier, but whether Creed still had a place in the lives they had now. The healthier relationships came first. Finding out whether the band still worked came afterward.
That’s why I like that the first public step back wasn’t immediately another album or an enormous declaration that Creed had returned for good. It was the Summer of ’99 Cruise. A few days on a ship was a much smaller container for something that had once become too big for the people inside it. They could get together, rehearse these songs again, stand on a stage together, and find out what the relationship felt like when it wasn’t being asked to carry an entire future.
Then people tried to get on that boat.
The response to that cautious little opening revealed something nobody inside the band could have completely known while they were repairing those relationships: Creed hadn’t simply survived in people’s memories. There was a huge audience waiting for them, including people who had been there the first time and people who had discovered the band while Creed wasn’t even active.
That order matters. The demand didn’t repair Creed. Creed repaired enough of itself to discover the demand.
Once that happened, the scale of what might be possible changed very quickly, but I don’t think the reason it worked changed with it. Nobody had to abandon the lives they’d built while Creed was gone, and nobody had to pretend 2004 or 2012 hadn’t happened. They only had to decide whether the four people standing in the room now could make something healthier out of the thing those younger versions of themselves hadn’t known how to hold together.
Before they actually stepped onto that first reunion stage, Scott released an album that makes this part of the chronology almost impossible to ignore.
HIGHER POWER ✝️
Higher Power arrived in March 2024, only weeks before Creed would perform together again for the first time in more than a decade. If I were trying to invent a clean narrative for this post, I’d probably worry that timing was a little too convenient. Scott had spent years rebuilding his life; the relationships inside Creed had finally reached a place where the band could try again, and just before he walked back into that history, he released a solo record built around survival, faith, recovery, and what it means to keep moving after you’ve already discovered how far down you can go.
What keeps Higher Power from feeling like a tidy redemption record to me is that Scott doesn’t write as though recovery gave him a finish line. That would almost be easier. The album lives much more in the reality that surviving something doesn’t mean you’re finished dealing with it, and becoming healthier doesn’t mean every old instinct, fear, or consequence disappears. That’s a much more interesting place for Scott to be writing from because the earliest Creed records were already filled with somebody trying to understand guilt, faith, darkness, and the possibility of becoming something better. The questions haven’t completely changed. The person asking them has.
The title track makes that difference especially clear. Scott has always written directly from his own life, sometimes so directly that separating the singer from the song becomes almost impossible, and “Higher Power” takes experiences that could have remained attached only to the worst parts of his history and turns them toward the fact that he survived them. I don’t hear that as Scott declaring himself fixed. I hear somebody who knows exactly what he’s capable of losing and has learned that staying alive, sober, and connected to the things that matter to him requires work he doesn’t get to graduate from.
That idea runs through more than one song. “Black Butterfly” uses transformation without pretending transformation happens once, while “If These Walls Could Talk,” with Dorothy, lets Scott sit with the kind of history that doesn’t disappear simply because you’ve decided to live differently. “What I Deserve” turns toward relationships and the uncomfortable space where two people can both carry hurt, both believe they understand what happened, and still have to decide what they’re going to do with each other afterward. Even when the record reaches for hope, it isn’t the uncomplicated kind.
I think that’s why Higher Power belongs in this Creed story rather than sitting beside it as a Scott Stapp solo album we need to mention for completeness. The record gives us a way to hear the distance between the Scott who couldn’t keep the second Creed chapter together and the Scott who was about to walk back onto a Creed stage. Recovery still isn’t a time machine, and Higher Power is what that idea sounds like in music. Scott can’t go backward and become the person he wishes he’d been during every difficult year. He can only decide what kind of person is going to carry those years forward.
There is also something fitting about Scott doing that under his own name immediately before Creed returned. He wasn’t disappearing back inside the band that made him famous. He had already spent years proving he could make music without Creed, just as Mark, Brian, and Flip had proven the same thing in their own ways. The Great Divide, Proof of Life, and The Space Between the Shadows had each captured different versions of Scott outside Creed, and Higher Power arrived from somebody with enough distance to understand that having Creed back didn’t require giving that identity up.
That matters because Creed doesn’t have to become the ending of Scott’s recovery story any more than his solo career has to disappear now that Creed is active again. He can release Higher Power, tour his own music, and still walk onto a stage beside Mark, Brian, and Flip carrying that entire life with him.
There’s a parallel here with everything we’ve been saying about Mark, even though the work each man did during Creed‘s absence took them in opposite directions. Mark’s years away expanded outward musically into Alter Bridge, Tremonti, becoming a singer, Sinatra, and all of these places he discovered he could go. Scott’s most important expansion was inward. His catalog grew too, but the bigger change was learning how to live with himself more healthily, giving the old relationships in his life a chance to change with him.
I don’t want to romanticize that because the ugly parts were real, and the people around Scott had to live through them too. That’s precisely why Higher Power matters here.
Then, less than a month after Higher Power arrived, Scott walked onto a stage with Creed again.
This time, the band wasn’t trying to prove it could recreate 1999. They were about to find out just how much 1999 still meant to everybody else.
THE ART OF LETTING GO 💀
By the time Myles released The Art of Letting Go in 2024, I don’t think there was much point in asking what separated his solo career from Alter Bridge or Slash anymore. Year of the Tiger had answered why he needed a musical identity of his own in the first place, while The Ides of March proved that identity didn’t have to stay acoustic, stripped back, or tied to one particular kind of songwriting. Six years and two records after finally putting his own name on the front, Myles had enough history here that album number three could simply start from the assumption that a Myles Kennedy record was allowed to sound like whatever Myles Kennedy wanted it to sound like.
This time that meant turning the guitars way back up, although not so much that everything he’d discovered on the first two records disappeared underneath them. The electric guitar had already returned on The Ides of March, but The Art of Letting Go feels more comfortable putting the riff right at the center of things. The title track opens the record that way; “Say What You Will” keeps pushing in the same direction, and songs like “Saving Face” have much more weight and swagger than somebody might expect if their idea of solo Myles was still frozen somewhere around Year of the Tiger.
The funny thing is that none of it makes me think he’s drifting toward Alter Bridge or trying to make his own version of a Slash record. Three solo albums finally make it pretty clear that the difference between these projects was never going to be as simple as heavy music goes here, acoustic music goes there, and whatever is left over becomes a solo record. Myles has spent enough time inside all three worlds to know the difference even when the musical borders overlap, and by this point I’m not sure he needs to explain that difference to anybody else.
The way the songs get built is already different depending on which room he’s standing in. With Alter Bridge, Myles has Mark to bounce ideas off, and we’ve spent a ridiculous number of words by now following that relationship from Myles singing songs Mark had largely written into the two of them becoming genuine writing and guitar partners. With Slash, the starting point changes again, with Myles finding the melody and lyric that belong over whatever Slash and the Conspirators have started building. Put Myles’ own name on the front, and there isn’t somebody else waiting on the other side of the idea unless he invites them there. If a chorus isn’t working, there isn’t a Mark to throw another possibility at him or a Slash riff already sitting underneath it, giving him somewhere to go.
That sounds incredibly freeing until you remember freedom also means nobody else is there to tell you when you’ve disappeared up your own ass. Myles had spent decades learning how to collaborate with people who have very strong musical identities of their own, so going back into his solo work meant taking all of those lessons with him while still being the person who ultimately had to decide where the song was going. The Art of Letting Go sounds much more comfortable with that responsibility than either of the records before it because he doesn’t seem particularly interested in proving how different he can be from his other bands anymore. If the song needs a giant riff, it gets one. If it needs to pull back, it can do that too.
“Say What You Will” is a good example because the riff could probably survive comfortably in a much heavier setting, but the song doesn’t need to become more complicated simply because Myles is capable of making it complicated. There’s an immediacy to it that feels like somebody enjoying being a guitar player, and I think that’s one of the biggest things The Ides of March unlocked for whatever came after it. Myles had already reminded everybody, including perhaps himself, that the ridiculous voice isn’t the only ridiculous thing happening here.
That guitar-player side gets even more room on The Art of Letting Go. “Behind the Veil” especially feels like Myles permitting himself to follow the guitar farther than one of his other projects might need him to, and I love that this is becoming part of what his solo identity means without becoming the only thing it means. He can stretch out because there isn’t another guitarist waiting for his turn, but the song still has to be worth stretching, and Myles has been doing this far too long to confuse playing more with automatically making something better.
There’s something kind of full circle about him getting to this point too. Before Alter Bridge, before Slash and before most people knew what that voice could do, Myles was already a guitar player. The Mayfield Four didn’t begin with him waiting around for somebody to discover him as a singer so his real career could start. That history existed long before Mark made the phone call that changed everything, and the farther Myles gets into his solo catalog, the more some of those earlier pieces of him seem to have room to come forward again without needing to compete with everything that happened afterward.
The amount of guitar isn’t really the most interesting change on The Art of Letting Go, though. There’s something in the title itself that feels like a Myles Kennedy idea even before you get into any particular lyric. This is somebody whose career has repeatedly required letting go of what he thought the next thing was supposed to look like. The Mayfield Four didn’t become the band that carried him for the next twenty years. Alter Bridge didn’t remain simply the place where he sang somebody else’s songs. Slash didn’t stay a one-off phone call. His solo career didn’t stay the acoustic little corner he’d originally created for material that didn’t fit anywhere else.
I don’t hear that as Myles suddenly becoming the most relaxed person alive, because I’m not sure anybody would buy that. I hear somebody old enough to recognize which parts of himself have been useful and which ones occasionally make life harder than it needs to be. Worry can make you prepared. Perfectionism can make you very good at something. Caring about the outcome can be part of why you work hard enough to have a career that lasts this long. None of those qualities is automatically a problem until you discover you don’t know how to turn them off when they’re no longer helping.
The art part of The Art of Letting Go is what makes that more interesting to me than simply telling somebody they need to let something go. Letting go isn’t indifference. It isn’t deciding nothing matters or that you should stop caring whether the thing you’ve spent months creating is any good. It’s learning that caring deeply about something doesn’t magically give you control over what happens to it once you’ve done everything you can, which is probably a useful lesson when your career depends on releasing pieces of yourself into the world and then watching strangers decide what they think of them.
It also connects surprisingly well to the larger story we’ve been following without requiring us to pretend Myles wrote the album about Creed, Alter Bridge, or any of the other bands that have taken over this monster. So many of these careers changed when the version of the future somebody expected stopped being available. Mark eventually built a musical life much larger than Creed. Brian and Flip discovered there was another band waiting on the other side of it. Myles stopped treating his solo career like something he’d get around to when everything else finally left him enough time. Scott’s version was much more serious because some of the patterns he needed to leave behind were actively destroying the life he was trying to keep.
None of those people stopped caring just because they eventually accepted that they couldn’t control every outcome. I think that’s a distinction that becomes easier to understand once you’ve lived enough life to watch a few things refuse to go according to plan, because letting go and giving up aren’t remotely the same thing. There are times when fighting harder really can change the outcome, and there are other times when fighting harder becomes another way of refusing to accept that the outcome has already changed. Figuring out which situation you’re actually standing in is probably where the art comes in.
Thankfully, the record doesn’t spend ten songs repeating that exact thought because even a good philosophy can become exhausting if every chorus starts sounding like a motivational seminar. “Mr. Downside” gets to have more fun with the darker voice inside your own head, while “Miss You When You’re Gone” approaches loss and impermanence from a much more melodic place. Some ideas connect pieces of the record, but The Art of Letting Go still feels like a collection of songs rather than Myles deciding album three needed some giant concept to justify why it exists.
“Eternal Lullaby” is where the record hits me differently because it turns toward musicians who aren’t here anymore and the strange way influence survives the person who created it. Myles came up listening to voices and players who helped shape what he eventually became, and some of those people are gone even though pieces of what they created are still showing up in musicians who came after them.
Chris Cornell obviously makes that thought land particularly hard for me.
There are artists whose influence isn’t something you can cleanly trace by saying this singer sounds like that singer or this guitarist learned that person’s trick. Sometimes somebody changes your understanding of what music is allowed to do, and that becomes part of whatever you make afterward. The person can disappear while the thing they unlocked in somebody else keeps moving, sometimes through people who never met them and might not even realize how many layers of influence are sitting between what they’re making now and the person who started that chain decades earlier.
For Myles, somebody like Cornell belongs in that lineage, as does Jeff Buckley and the other voices and musicians who expanded his idea of what singing and songwriting could be. By 2024, Myles had been doing this long enough that another generation of singers and guitar players was almost certainly looking at him the same way. I have to imagine that’s a strange thing to realize while you’re still busy thinking about all the people who made you want to do this in the first place.
It fits The Art of Letting Go better than I initially expected because eventually legacy becomes another thing you don’t completely control. You can make the music, try to make it as good and honest as you know how, and then whatever it means to somebody else belongs partly to them. The artists Myles grew up loving couldn’t decide exactly which pieces of their music he’d carry forward, just like Myles doesn’t get to decide which part of his work becomes the thing somebody else remembers twenty years from now. All he can really do is make the music, put it out there, and eventually let it belong to whoever finds something in it.
After Year of the Tiger carried something so deeply personal and The Ides of March arrived in the middle of a world full of uncertainty, I also like that The Art of Letting Go doesn’t need a crisis to justify its existence. There are dark ideas here, there are losses and questions and plenty for Myles to chew on, but there’s also the simple pleasure of plugging in a guitar and finding a riff that makes you want to keep playing it. We’ve spent so much time looking for the meaning underneath every turn these guys made that it’s easy to forget one extremely obvious reason people keep making music for decades: they actually enjoy doing this.
Myles clearly loves playing guitar. Mark clearly loves playing guitar. Put the two of them together and apparently somebody eventually has to remind them there are other people in Alter Bridge. Myles’ solo career gives him a place where nobody needs to remind him because he’s the person deciding how much guitar is too much guitar, and The Art of Letting Go sounds like he’s finally comfortable enjoying that freedom instead of carrying all the expectation that used to come with the idea of making a solo record.
The people around him still matter, though, and I think that’s one of the more interesting contradictions in calling any of this a solo career. Zia Uddin behind the drums isn’t some studio player Myles happened to find when he needed somebody for the record. Their musical relationship reaches all the way back to before The Mayfield Four, which gives this supposedly solo part of Myles’ career another connection to the person he was before most of this story happened. Tim Tournier on bass gives that relationship a center, and together the three of them make the record feel less like Myles stacking every instrument around himself and more like people actually playing his songs together.
There’s something I really like about that because Myles finally built a musical place with his own name on the front and still didn’t make it genuinely solitary. The decisions ultimately belong to him, but music has almost never worked that way in his life. The Mayfield Four needed relationships. Alter Bridge absolutely does. Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators became its own band partly because of the chemistry between the people in it. Even when Myles finally created somewhere that belonged completely to him, he still surrounded himself with people he trusted enough to let them change what the songs became.
“How the Story Ends” is a fitting place to close the record because it keeps letting the title operate on more than one level. You can spend years trying to control what ending you’re heading toward and still discover the story had other ideas. Myles has certainly lived enough versions of that musically. Bands ended, bands began, phone calls arrived, careers overlapped, and the thing he originally thought he might do on the side became another permanent branch of his life.
Three albums into his solo career, that’s probably what interests me most about where Myles had arrived. Year of the Tiger needed to exist because there was something in his history he couldn’t comfortably put anywhere else. The Ides of March expanded the musical boundaries and gave Myles the guitar player much more room to come forward. The Art of Letting Go doesn’t feel like it needs to justify itself against either of them, and I think that’s probably the clearest sign that the experiment worked.
By the third record, I’m not sure there even needs to be one particular sound tying all of this together anymore. Myles is the thing tying it together, and that’s enough. The acoustic songs, the heavier stuff, the blues, the lap steel, the ridiculous guitar playing and whatever else he decides belongs there can coexist because his solo career has finally been around long enough that it doesn’t need a narrower definition than the person making it.
That’s a pretty substantial distance from the singer Mark remembered after The Mayfield Four opened for Creed all those years ago. He wasn’t available when the first call came. Good thing Mark tried again.
Which brings us back toward one of the bands sitting at the center of this entire ridiculous story, because while Myles was making a record about getting better at letting go, Creed was proving that letting go of something doesn’t necessarily mean you can never pick it back up. The harder part is making sure you aren’t trying to pick it up as exactly the same people who put it down, because by then too much life had happened to all of them for that to work anyway.
THE SUMMER OF ’99 BEGINS AGAIN 🚢
When Creed announced the Summer of ’99 Cruise in 2023, I don’t think anybody could have known exactly what had just been set in motion. There was obviously an audience for Creed. You don’t sell tens of millions of records, disappear for more than a decade, and suddenly become an obscure band nobody remembers. Obviously there was still an audience. The real question was what that audience looked like now, how badly people wanted Creed back, and whether those who discovered the songs while the band was gone would actually show up beside the people who had lived through them the first time.
We already know how quickly that cautious experiment outgrew itself. The first cruise sold out, another sailing was added, and that sold too. Then came the Summer of ’99 Tour, and what had begun as a relatively contained way for Scott, Mark, Brian, and Flip to see whether Creed still felt right became something much larger. Amphitheaters filled. More dates followed. Arena shows were added. By the end of 2024, they had played more than sixty sold-out shows across North America and sold hundreds of thousands of tickets, and what interested me wasn’t simply that Creed could still draw a crowd. It was how little the crowd seemed interested in treating this like a funeral for a band everybody used to love.
That’s where the Summer of ’99 era started becoming something different from the 2009 reunion for me. Full Circle was a real reunion, and I don’t want to diminish it just because this one became bigger. They made a new record then. I saw them twice during that period, after having first seen them in 2002, and those shows are part of my own history with this band. What 2009 didn’t have was this strange sense that the culture around Creed had changed while Creed was gone.
For a long time, liking Creed came with an asterisk in certain corners of music culture. They were too earnest, too successful, too everywhere, too easy to make fun of once the sound they helped popularize stopped being fashionable. Some of that criticism was fair because no band that big is above criticism, and some of it became lazy enough that Creed itself was treated like the punchline instead of anybody actually talking about the songs. The weird thing about disappearing for more than a decade is that the songs get to live without the cultural noise that originally surrounded them. A generation too young to care about the original backlash found “One Last Breath,” “Higher,” “My Sacrifice,” and “With Arms Wide Open” without inheriting all of the instructions about how they were supposed to feel about Creed.
By the time the band returned, irony and sincerity had become tangled together in a way I don’t think anybody could have manufactured. Creed songs were showing up in sports, social media, and places that had nothing to do with a traditional rock reunion. Some people probably started singing “Higher” because it was funny to sing “Can you take me higher?” with an entire stadium. The thing about a chorus that big is that after a while it stops mattering why you started singing it. Thousands of people singing the same song together tends to burn through irony pretty quickly.
The Texas Rangers’ 2023 World Series run was one of the strangest pieces of that shift because Creed suddenly found itself attached to a championship baseball story before the band had even played its reunion shows. It would be easy to treat that as a funny footnote, but I think it helped expose something that was already happening. These songs had become communal again. “Higher” wasn’t being rediscovered because somebody had convinced everyone Creed deserved a critical reassessment. People were using it because it worked. It still did the thing it had been written to do.
That probably matters more than any argument about whether Creed was secretly cool all along. I don’t really need history to rewrite itself that neatly. They were massively successful, frequently mocked, genuinely important to a lot of people, and imperfect in ways that became easier to see once an entire generation of bands started copying pieces of what they did. All of those things can be true at once. What changed during Summer of ’99 was that liking the band stopped feeling like something people needed to defend.
For me, there was another layer to watching all of this happen because Creed wasn’t a band I discovered through the reunion. I saw them on August 10, 2002, near the end of the first run, when Weathered was still the present instead of a record people were nostalgic for. I saw them again on September 1, 2009, after the first reunion, and then again on August 15, 2010, during the Full Circle era. I had already watched Creed disappear, come back, disappear again, and eventually become one of those bands I assumed I’d probably already seen for the last time.
At the same time, I hadn’t spent those missing years simply waiting for Creed to return. Scott’s show on March 11, 2006 belongs to my history with this music. So do Alter Bridge on November 7, 2007, and August 9, 2008. By the time Creed returned, Mark, Brian, and Flip weren’t just three guys from Creed to me anymore, and Scott wasn’t simply the singer who had left it. I’d spent too many years following where all of them went next for the reunion to feel like somebody had finally put the original pieces back where they belonged.
That makes seeing the four of them choose Creed again more interesting than nostalgia by itself ever could. Summer of ’99 doesn’t erase Alter Bridge, Tremonti, Scott’s solo records, Myles, Slash, Sinatra, or anything else we’ve spent all this time talking about. It lands differently because all of those things happened. The band standing on those stages in 2024 contained the same four people, but there were another twenty years of music, failure, recovery, parenthood, loss, success, and perspective inside them.
The first cruise finally put that version of Creed in front of an audience in April 2024. They hadn’t played together publicly since 2012, and rather than easing into the safest possible greatest-hits set, the shows reached across the catalog. The obvious songs were there because, of course, they were, but so were pieces of the band that had been sitting untouched for years. Hearing songs from My Own Prison, Human Clay, Weathered, and even Full Circle occupying the same stage again made the reunion feel less like Creed selecting one version of its past and more like the band accepting that all of it belonged to them.
There is something I like about the cruise being where that happened. An arena would have made the comeback feel enormous immediately. A cruise is strangely intimate for a band that once existed at stadium scale. The musicians and fans were effectively stuck in the same floating little world for several days, which gave the reunion room to be celebratory before it had to become an industry story about ticket sales and venue records. They got to remember what being Creed felt like before the rest of us started measuring how big Creed could become again.
They found out soon enough.
ARE YOU READY? 🔝
The Summer of ’99 Tour began in July 2024, and by then the cautious experiment had already become a full reunion. The scale kept growing because the demand kept answering every question put in front of it. What started on the water moved into amphitheaters, then the Are You Ready? Tour extended the year into arenas. The title was almost too perfect because by that point the answer had become fairly obvious. People were ready, and not only the people who had been waiting since 2012.
What I don’t want to lose underneath all the numbers is what those crowds represented. Some fans had bought My Own Prison when it was new, people who came in during Human Clay and Weathered, people like me who had memories attached to seeing different versions of these musicians across decades, and people who had never had a chance to see Creed because the band had been gone for a huge part of their lives. That’s a much broader reunion audience than four guys simply playing to the people who missed them.
It also changed the energy around the songs. “One Last Breath” had found another life online. “Higher” had become something stadium crowds could turn into a communal joke without the joke really diminishing the song. “My Sacrifice” had survived every era of rock radio between its release and the reunion. The songs weren’t returning from storage. They had been circulating without the band and gathering new associations the entire time.
That might be why the shows could feel nostalgic without feeling trapped by nostalgia. Creed wasn’t pretending these songs were new, and the audience wasn’t pretending twenty-five years hadn’t passed. Everybody seemed perfectly comfortable with the fact that these songs belonged to another period of their lives while also discovering that they still worked in this one.
I think Scott’s voice matters enormously here too. A Creed reunion was always going to live or die partly on whether those songs still sounded convincing coming out of him. By 2024 he wasn’t trying to imitate the physical or emotional state of the person who recorded them in his twenties. He was singing them as the person he had become, and there is something heavier about hearing some of those lyrics from somebody who actually lived through everything that came after writing them.
Mark, Brian and Flip were doing the same thing instrumentally. None of them had spent the missing years preserving themselves in amber. Mark had become a much broader guitarist and songwriter. Brian and Flip had spent two decades playing increasingly complicated Alter Bridge music. They could have come back and overplayed Creed because their technical vocabulary had expanded so much. Instead, part of the strength of the reunion is hearing them remember what these songs need. “My Own Prison“ doesn’t become better because you add everything you learned making Fortress to it. Sometimes growth is knowing you don’t have to.
Eric Friedman joining them onstage as a touring guitarist adds another quiet connection to the larger family tree too. He comes out of Tremonti’s world and helps Creed reproduce the layered guitar parts live without pretending Mark suddenly grew another pair of hands during the missing years.
By the time 2024 ended, it was difficult to keep describing any of this as a comeback experiment. Creed had gone from a cruise designed to test the waters to amphitheaters and arenas in the same year. More importantly, they still seemed to like being Creed when the year was over, which may be the biggest success of all.
THIS ISN’T 2009 🌅
The easiest way to measure this reunion is through ticket sales because the numbers are ridiculous enough to make the point quickly. By the time the 2025 dates were being announced, Creed had already played more than sixty sold-out North American shows and moved more than 800,000 tickets. The run continued through another sold-out cruise, another Summer of ’99 tour, and the band’s own festival, eventually pushing the reunion past a million tickets sold.
Those numbers matter because they establish scale, but they aren’t the reason I think this reunion has become more important than the one in 2009. The bigger difference is durability.
The 2009 reunion produced Full Circle, which gives it something this era still doesn’t have yet: new Creed music. It was also the reunion I actually got to experience twice in person, and I’m not interested in rewriting it as some false start simply because we know it eventually ended. It mattered. The band made a good record, put together a successful tour, and proved the musical connection wasn’t dead. What it didn’t do was become sustainable.
The current era has now survived the thing that usually exposes whether a reunion is real: time. The initial excitement wore off, and there was still another tour. The first cruise happened, and there was another one. Then another. Then another. Summer of ’99 stopped describing a single nostalgic concept and became almost a name for this entire period of Creed‘s life.
The 2025 continuation makes that especially clear. By then, there was no mystery left about whether people wanted Creed back. They did. The band could have treated 2024 as the victory lap, collected the enormous comeback story and walked away with a much happier ending than the one they’d had in 2012. Instead, they kept going.
That matters because continuing creates a different kind of pressure than returning. A comeback can run on adrenaline. Eventually you have to decide whether you actually want this thing in your life when it becomes work again. There are rehearsals, travel days, interviews, the physical demands of performing, scheduling around Alter Bridge, Tremonti, Scott’s solo career, and everything else these people still do. The fact that Creed continued through 2025 and into 2026 says more to me about the health of the reunion than the first sold-out show ever could.
The cruises tell the same story in a slightly absurd way. What began as the safest container for Creed to try being Creed again became an annual event substantial enough to develop its own identity. The 2026 sailing was the fourth voyage connected to Summer of ’99 and Beyond, with Creed still playing multiple headline sets while the lineup around them grew into a celebration of an entire era of rock rather than simply one band’s reunion.
And it still didn’t end there. A fifth Summer of ’99 and Beyond Cruise is already sold out for April 2027. By then, this thing that started as a cautious reunion experiment will have been part of Creed‘s life for four years. The concept has become its own little ecosystem, with bands like Breaking Benjamin, Sevendust, Hoobastank, Our Lady Peace, Hinder, and others surrounding Creed. Weirdly, the band that spent years being treated as an embarrassing symbol of late-’90s rock now hosts a recurring celebration of the period.
I kind of love that.
There is also a practical reason I think the reunion can keep existing this way. Creed no longer has to consume everybody’s entire musical life to remain active. The schedules are undoubtedly complicated, but by this point everybody involved has spent years learning how to move between different projects without treating one of them as a threat to another. That’s a very different situation from the attempted fifth album after Full Circle, when figuring out where Creed fit beside everything else could still become part of the conflict.
That makes the future much more interesting because for the first time in a very long time, asking what comes next for Creed doesn’t feel like asking whether the relationships can survive long enough to get there.
It feels like asking what they actually want to make together.
THE END WILL SHOW US HOW 🔚
Creed becoming an active part of Mark’s life again didn’t slow Tremonti down. The End Will Show Us How arrived in January 2025 while the Creed reunion was still expanding, and I think its existence says almost as much about why Creed works now as anything happening inside Creed itself. Twenty years earlier, competing musical identities could become part of the tension around the band. Now Mark can spend months standing beside Scott playing some of the biggest songs of his life and still have another record waiting that sounds unmistakably like Tremonti.
By album number six, Tremonti doesn’t need to prove how heavy it can be anymore. The interesting part of The End Will Show Us How is how comfortable the band has become letting heaviness sit beside space, melody, and a version of Mark’s voice that keeps sounding more natural the less he seems interested in forcing it somewhere else. “Just Too Much” has the kind of enormous riff that makes immediate sense coming from him, while “The Mother, the Earth and I,” “One More Time,” and the title track leave enough room around the weight for the songs to breathe.
That vocal evolution connects directly back to everything we talked about with Marching in Time and Sinatra. Mark didn’t learn to sing standards, put the orchestra away, and return to metal unchanged. He brought the lessons with him. The lower register, restraint, and comfort with his natural voice give this version of Tremonti another color that wasn’t nearly as developed on All I Was. The person singing these songs had spent more than a decade fronting this band and years studying a completely different kind of vocalist, and those experiences had started folding into one another.
Eric Friedman remains a huge part of why Tremonti feels like a band rather than Mark’s collection of songs. That becomes even more interesting during the Creed reunion because Eric is also standing onstage with Creed as an additional guitarist, helping reproduce guitar layers Mark originally had to build himself. The family tree has started folding back over itself. A musician who became essential to the band Mark created outside Creed now helps Mark play Creed, while Mark can leave that stage and go straight back into music that developed an identity completely separate from it.
I don’t think Mark has to choose which version of himself is the real one anymore. That’s the larger change. Creed is real. Alter Bridge is real. Tremonti is real. The Sinatra work is real. None of them have to be demoted to protect another one, and The End Will Show Us How arriving in the middle of Creed‘s biggest run in decades is about as good a demonstration of that as I can think of.
The title also feels accidentally appropriate for where this entire story has reached. For years the future was the thing nobody could answer. Would Creed ever play again? Could Scott and Mark repair their relationship? Could Creed coexist with Alter Bridge? Would Tremonti remain another permanent band? Would Myles keep all of his different musical lives moving at once?
Most of those questions have answers now.
The interesting ones are the questions nobody could ask until everybody got here.
ALTER BRIDGE KEEPS MOVING 8️⃣
Creed returning was never going to mean Alter Bridge stopped existing, and by 2026 that point hardly needs defending. More than twenty years after One Day Remains, Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip have their own history to continue, and the distance between Alter Bridge and Creed is large enough now that I don’t really think of one as competing with the other. That probably would have been a harder argument to make in 2004, when Alter Bridge inevitably looked like the thing three members of Creed were doing after Creed, but twenty-plus years is an awfully long time for something to remain defined by what came before it.
Following this entire chronology instead of looking at each band separately makes that even clearer to me. Mark can bring things he learned through Tremonti and Sinatra back into Alter Bridge, including a voice he probably never imagined would become this important when the band started. Myles brings decades of growth through Slash and his solo records, not just as a singer but as a writer, guitar player, and frontman. Brian and Flip can spend a Creed cycle rediscovering the economy those songs require and then return to music that asks much more complicated things from the rhythm section. None of them come back to Alter Bridge exactly where they left it because their musical lives don’t stop when Alter Bridge does.
That’s always been one of the quieter strengths of the band. Alter Bridge doesn’t need to contain every piece of any of them. Mark has Tremonti for music that belongs there, and apparently another life as Frank Sinatra when the mood strikes. Myles can disappear into a record with Slash, make something entirely under his own name, or spend seven minutes following a guitar idea because nobody is standing beside him waiting for their solo. Brian and Flip have been able to move between different versions of this musical family without needing every one of those rooms to ask the same thing from them. Then the four of them come back together, and Alter Bridge becomes the place where everything they’ve been doing apart gets another chance to affect what they can do together.
Their self-titled eighth album feels like a pretty good example of that. There’s something almost appropriate about waiting more than twenty years to finally make a record called Alter Bridge, because by 2026 nobody really needs to explain what those two words mean anymore. They can open the record with “Silent Divide,” built from a riff Myles brought in, give Mark more room behind the microphone on “Trust in Me,” still let the guitars get enormous and eventually spend more than nine minutes working through “Slave to Master” without any of it feeling like the band is trying to prove how far they’ve moved from One Day Remains. Even recording part of the album at Eddie Van Halen’s 5150 Studios feels less like four guys chasing somebody else’s history and more like a band comfortable enough in its own skin to walk into a place like that and simply make an Alter Bridge record. After everything Mark, Myles, Brian, and Flip had done since Pawns & Kings, including Creed becoming a very real part of Mark, Brian, and Flip’s lives again, they came back together and somehow still sounded like the same four people without sounding stuck where we’d left them.
That’s a long way from how this started. One Day Remains began with three musicians carrying an enormous amount of Creed history trying to build something new with a singer Mark remembered from years earlier. By the time they finally put their own name on an album, nobody inside Alter Bridge needed the band to be an answer to anything.
The Alter Bridge that exists now contains more than two decades of its own history plus everything those four people have done outside it. Somewhere in all of those years, the direction of influence stopped running only from Creed toward Alter Bridge. Creed obviously helped create the circumstances that made Alter Bridge possible, but Alter Bridge has now spent long enough shaping Mark, Brian, and Flip that the musicians returning to Creed are also products of everything they learned there. Mark didn’t somehow remove twenty years of playing and writing beside Myles before walking back into Creed, and Brian and Flip didn’t forget all of the more progressive and complicated music they’d spent those years learning how to hold together. They brought all of that history back with them, even when the best thing they could do for a Creed song was know when not to use most of it.
I think that last part matters more than it initially seems because growth doesn’t always mean adding something. Sometimes being a better musician means understanding that a song doesn’t need everything you’re now capable of doing. Brian doesn’t need to turn “With Arms Wide Open” into Fortress to prove the last twenty years happened, and Flip doesn’t need to fill every available space simply because Alter Bridge has given him plenty of opportunities to play music that demands more from him technically. Going back to Creed means respecting what made those songs work in the first place while inevitably playing them as musicians with another two decades of experience behind them.
I don’t really know how to call Creed the old band and Alter Bridge the new one anymore anyway. Alter Bridge hasn’t been new for a very long time, and the Creed standing onstage now isn’t four guys frozen in 2001 waiting for somebody to press play again. Both bands have accumulated their own history, expectations, and relationships between the people inside them, even when three of those people happen to be the same. What Mark, Brian, and Flip have with Scott isn’t the same musical relationship they have with Myles, and I don’t think either one becomes more legitimate by pretending it should be.
Myles is obviously the piece that makes that relationship even more interesting because he doesn’t belong to Creed’s history and never needed to. His place in this family tree came from helping Mark, Brian, and Flip build something after Creed, then becoming so central to their musical lives that any account of where those three musicians are now is incomplete without him. Between Alter Bridge, Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, The Mayfield Four, and his solo work, he built an enormous career inside the space that opened when Creed first ended without ever becoming a replacement for Scott.
In 2004, it probably wasn’t unreasonable for somebody looking at all of this from the outside to reduce the story to Creed broke up and the other guys got a new singer. More than twenty years later, that description feels almost ridiculous. Myles didn’t step into Scott’s place because Alter Bridge eventually created a place that had never belonged to Scott at all. Scott’s voice belongs inside Creed in a way that is inseparable from what those songs became, while Myles’ voice, writing, and guitar playing became inseparable from Alter Bridge through a history they built together. Mark, Brian, and Flip didn’t replace one relationship with another. They built another relationship, and enough time eventually passed for both of them to exist without one needing to erase the other.
I hear Creed‘s return differently because of that too. If Alter Bridge had disappeared after a few records or never really become more than the band those guys formed after Creed, it would be much easier to treat the reunion as everybody finally returning to the thing they were supposed to be doing all along. Except that’s not what happened. Alter Bridge worked. It worked ridiculously well. More than twenty years later, it has a catalog, identity, and audience large enough that Creed doesn’t need to validate it or threaten it.
That’s why I don’t think these bands make much sense as rival outcomes anymore. One didn’t win. Creed‘s return doesn’t prove everybody was supposed to come back here eventually, and Alter Bridge’s longevity doesn’t make Creed unnecessary. They ask different things from Mark, Brian, and Flip, while Scott and Myles occupy places in those relationships that were never actually interchangeable. Both bands can matter without either one needing the other to disappear.
There was a time when the existence of one really did seem connected to the ending of the other. Alter Bridge was born because Creed fell apart, and the first Creed reunion inevitably created questions about what that meant for the band Mark, Brian, Flip, and Myles had built afterward. They have enough history now that I don’t think those questions carry the same weight. Mark can stand onstage beside Scott one year and Myles the next without either relationship needing to be less real. Brian and Flip can move between those catalogs without choosing which twenty years of their lives count. Myles can continue building the thing he helped create without needing to become part of Creed, and Scott can stand in the place that was always his without that somehow threatening what came after him.
I don’t think I would have expected that ending when this story split apart more than twenty years ago. For a long time, it seemed like getting one of these bands required losing the other. Somehow we’ve reached a point where nobody has to lose anything for somebody else to get something back.
The future now has room for both.
THE FIFTH CREED ALBUM 5️⃣
Which brings me back to something we left sitting in 2015.
When With Arms Wide Open: A Retrospective gave us “Blistered,” “More Than This,” and “Why,” those songs felt like artifacts from a version of Creed that had never fully existed.
Ten years later, unfinished Creed music means something completely different.
There is material. Some of it has been sitting around for years, including sketches developed during the reunion period after Full Circle, because Mark never really stopped recognizing when something he wrote felt like Creed. Even before the current reunion reached the stage, certain pieces were being set aside rather than automatically fed into Alter Bridge or Tremonti. Once Scott, Mark, Brian, and Flip were actually back together and enjoying it, the question of new music stopped sounding like fan fiction and started sounding increasingly like a matter of finding the right time to do it.
I want to be careful with the difference between that and saying Creed has a finished fifth album waiting somewhere, because those aren’t the same thing. The old sketches aren’t secretly Creed V. Mark having ideas doesn’t mean Scott has written lyrics or melodies for them, Brian and Flip have shaped the arrangements, or the four of them have gone into a studio and made the record this version of Creed would actually want to make. If anything, I hope they don’t simply dust off thirteen old demos and call that the future.
Those ideas are interesting because they’re a starting point, not because they’re an answer.
What I really want to hear is what happens when the four people we’ve spent this entire post following make Creed music now.
That’s a much more interesting question than whether they can write another “Higher.”
Mark isn’t the guitarist who walked out of the Weathered era anymore. More than twenty years of writing with Myles Kennedy, six Tremonti records, becoming a lead singer, and then somehow ending up behind a microphone singing Sinatra have expanded what he can do in ways nobody could have predicted when Creed first ended. Brian and Flip spent those same two decades inside Alter Bridge learning how to support music that could become heavier, stranger, and more progressive without losing its center. Scott’s growth happened somewhere else entirely. Four solo albums sit behind him now, but so do recovery, repaired relationships, and a completely different relationship with themes he had already been wrestling with when Creed began.
How could those experiences not change what happens when they write together again?
At the same time, I don’t want a new Creed record that sounds like Alter Bridge with Scott singing, Tremonti with a different rhythm section, or a Scott Stapp solo album with Mark’s guitar on it. The challenge is almost the opposite of One Day Remains. Back then, Mark, Brian, and Flip had to discover how not to simply carry Creed into a new band. Now all four members of Creed have to let twenty years of growth into the room without losing the simplicity, space, and emotional directness that made Creed sound like Creed.
Brian and Flip may be especially important to that balance. Mark can write a riff that immediately feels like Creed, and Scott’s voice makes the identity unmistakable almost as soon as he enters, but the rhythm section decides a lot about where that song actually lives. Brian’s melodic movement and Flip’s ability to make a song feel enormous without filling every inch of it are part of the original language. After twenty years of Alter Bridge expanding what both of them can do, choosing what not to bring into Creed may matter as much as choosing what to bring.
The same is true for Mark. Some of the most exciting guitar work of his career belongs in Alter Bridge and Tremonti precisely because those bands give him room to do things Creed doesn’t need from him. Bringing twenty years of growth back into Creed doesn’t mean importing every trick he learned somewhere else. It means having more choices and understanding which ones belong here.
Scott presents the other side of that question. His writing has always been the emotional doorway into Creed, but the person standing behind those words now has twenty more years of life to draw from. I don’t need him to recreate the exact spiritual uncertainty of My Own Prison or the person reaching for something larger on Human Clay. I’d rather hear what those questions sound like after recovery, fatherhood, damaged relationships being repaired, and the experience of standing inside songs he wrote decades ago while an entirely new generation sings them back to him.
That’s where a fifth Creed album could become more than the missing entry in a discography.
It could tell us whether the thing we’ve been watching onstage has a creative future as well as a live one.
For the first time in a very long time, that feels like a realistic possibility rather than something I have to talk myself into believing, even if nobody should pretend a release date exists before one actually does. The relationships have already survived years of touring, competing schedules, and the return of the attention that once made Creed so difficult to live inside. New music doesn’t have to prove this reunion is real. It already is.
That may be the best possible place to start.
They don’t need Creed V.
They have to want it.
And everything about the current era makes it increasingly difficult for me to believe these four guys are going to keep finding this much joy in being Creed without eventually wanting to find out what Creed sounds like when the song is one nobody has heard before.
THIRTY YEARS LATER ♾
That’s the part of this story I keep coming back to. Creed‘s history makes much more sense to me when I stop treating every ending as an ending. The first breakup looked final until it created Alter Bridge and pushed Scott toward a solo career. Mark kept following his writing until Tremonti became another band and somehow Sinatra became part of the story too. Myles entered because Creed ended, then became so important to everything Mark, Brian, and Flip built afterward that removing him from this family tree would leave an enormous hole in it.
None of those branches replaced what came before them. They became lives of their own. That’s true for Brian and Flip, who spent twenty years helping another band develop an identity completely separate from Creed, and it’s true in a much more personal way for Scott, whose most important work during those missing years had very little to do with accumulating another band. He had to survive himself.
That’s why Creed existing beside all of it now matters so much more to me than simply getting Creed back.
That’s why the connected history matters more to me than simply ranking the records or deciding which band is better. Every ending changed what became possible next, even when nobody involved could have known that at the time.
The broken parts created branches.
The branches eventually made it possible to come back without asking the original tree to hold everything.
I don’t think any of them would have chosen the hardest parts of that history simply to get the music that came out of it. Scott’s struggles were real. Relationships were damaged. Years disappeared that nobody gets back. Alter Bridge had its own difficult periods. Every career here contains losses that aren’t suddenly justified because something good eventually grew beside them.
None of that changes where they are now.
Nearly thirty years after My Own Prison, none of these branches feels finished. Creed is active again. Alter Bridge is still moving. Tremonti has become its own institution, Sinatra somehow became another permanent piece of Mark’s musical life, and Scott and Myles both have careers that extend far beyond the bands most people first associate them with. After spending this entire post tracing where everybody went, the strangest part may be realizing how few of those roads actually ended.
And in the middle of all of that, there are still Creed ideas waiting.
I started this whole thing wanting to talk about Creed, Scott Stapp, and Alter Bridge because they’re connected. Somewhere in the process, the connection became the actual story. None of these careers make as much sense when you isolate them. They keep explaining one another.
There’s another piece of my own history with all of this that I hadn’t really thought about until I started putting this post together. I have an autographed Creed guitar pickguard I got in 2002, a signed copy of Blackbird from 2007, #219 of 500 autographed copies of Scott’s Sinner’s Creed from when the book was released in 2012, and a signed copy of Proof of Life from 2013. They’re all really awesome collector’s pieces on their own, and obviously I’ve known I’ve had them all these years. I just don’t think I’d ever put them all together and thought about what they actually represent.
The book is probably the most interesting one in that sense because I’m really not much of a reader. Somehow I got Sinner’s Creed and read the entire thing in one night. I wanted to know Scott’s story, and reading about his upbringing, where he came from, his struggles, and all of the ups and downs gave me a much better understanding of the person behind the voice I’d already been listening to for years. My signed edition also came with an exclusive download of “Sinner’s Creed,” because apparently even buying Scott’s book was going to lead me back to the music somehow.
There’s something kind of crazy about looking at the book now too. I read Scott telling his own story in 2012, but neither one of us knew how much of that story still hadn’t happened yet. Proof of Life was still a year away. Some of the hardest years of his life were still ahead of him. So was the recovery we’ve spent all this time talking about: The Space Between the Shadows, Higher Power, and, eventually, Creed finding its way back together again.
I definitely never thought of these four things as some kind of collection telling a story. They were just things I picked up over the years because I loved the music. Then I put them all together for this photo, and there it was: Creed in 2002, Alter Bridge in 2007, Scott telling his story in 2012, and Proof of Life in 2013. Twenty-four years after I got that pickguard, I’m looking at all four of them together and realizing I’ve had a little version of this entire family tree sitting here with me the whole time.
Most of my own live history with this family of music happened between 2002 and 2010, before a huge portion of this story had even been written. For years, I assumed that chapter was probably complete too.
Now I’m not sure anything about this story is complete.
For once, that’s a good thing.
THE VISUAL IN MY HEAD 📸
After spending this many words following Creed through nearly thirty years of music, there was no way I was going to put myself in front of a random backdrop, take an okay photo, and call it good. I kept coming back to one image almost immediately: Scott Stapp in the “Higher” video, arms stretched out in front of that enormous crowd. It’s one of those images that became inseparable from the song for me, and probably from Creed in general. If you know the video, I wanted you to be able to look at this photo and recognize where my brain went without me having to recreate every piece of it.
That’s why this isn’t really a recreation of the “Higher” video. I didn’t want to dress up as Scott Stapp. I wanted the feeling of it. The arms stretched wide, the stage, the lights, the giant concert energy, and that sense that the whole thing is reaching for something bigger than the room it’s standing in.
The pose was probably the most important part, so I made that one myself in Black Dragon’s poser. Once I had the body language where I wanted it, the rest of the photo started falling into place. Mossu’s Walter Tank Top gave me the simple white tank I needed, while AVEC TOI’s Placebo Trousers from the Twilight Leather Pack brought in the black leather without making the whole thing feel like a costume. I kept some of myself in the smaller details with [Deadwool]’s “Petite tuile” watch and the RealEvil Industries Atreides Bracelet & Rings. The visual needed to be recognizable, but I still wanted the person standing in the middle of it to be me.
I approached the stage the same way. [VORTECH]’s Concert Stage gave me somewhere to start, but I built the rest of the scene around the image I had in my head with the Spot On PBR Curtain, GCD’s Vintage Microphone with Stand and 9 Piece Heavy Rock Drum Kit, then surrounded everything with TIS Double Stage Speakers, Stage Subwoofers and Stage Flames. I wasn’t trying to rebuild the actual set from “Higher.” I wanted that wall-of-sound feeling behind me, the kind of stage where everything is a little excessive because rock shows are occasionally allowed to be exactly that.
The red/orange curtain and fire pushed the whole thing warmer than the original reference, which I ended up liking more anyway. It makes the picture mine instead of leaving it stuck inside their music video, and the light coming off the flames gives all that black leather and equipment enough warmth to keep the scene from disappearing behind me. There’s a lot happening back there, but that’s kind of the point. Creed was never a small-room band in my memory. Even when I first saw them in 2002, everything about that period of the band felt huge.
For the rest of me, I’m wearing Stray Dog’s HERVE head skin with VELOUR’s PICASSO HOMME FIT/TAN body skin, MFCNT’s THOR Bun and DUCKY SKUNK beard, ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears with = DAE = SXD1 HUMEN MALE EARRINGS, and [ContraptioN]’s Depthglass Eyes over Avi-Glam’s Prism Eyes. Those aren’t really part of the “Higher” reference at all, and that’s exactly why they’re there. I didn’t want to turn myself into Scott for the picture. I wanted to be standing inside the visual that has been stuck somewhere in my head for more than twenty-five years.
Somewhere while I was building all of this, the picture stopped feeling like a reference I was trying to recreate and started feeling like another piece of the same story. After everything we’ve just talked about, turning myself into Scott Stapp in 1999 would almost miss the point. I wanted something recognizable from that moment without pretending twenty-five years hadn’t happened since it.
Which brings me back to the song.
HIGHER 🧡
There are a lot of Creed songs that could have carried this post. “My Sacrifice” almost feels written for a story about people finding their way back to one another after years apart. “What’s This Life For” asks a question that somehow became more interesting the longer I spent writing about all of these lives. “One Last Breath” carries a lot more weight once you know everything Scott survived after singing it.
I kept coming back to “Higher.”
Part of that is probably obvious. It is one of the songs most inseparable from Creed, and the image of Scott standing there with his arms stretched out became almost as recognizable as the song itself. When I started thinking about the photo that would eventually sit above all these words, that was the image I couldn’t get out of my head.
But the longer this post became, the more “Higher” started making sense for reasons that had very little to do with recreating a music video.
When Creed recorded it, almost everything we’ve spent all this time talking about was still ahead of them. They were already becoming enormous, but Human Clay was about to send them somewhere very few bands ever get to go. None of them could have known how much would happen after they got there, how far apart their lives would eventually move, or how many completely unexpected places the music would take them before the four of them stood on the same stage again.
They wanted to go higher. Then they actually did.
I think that’s the part of the story that interests me more now because reaching the place you spent your life trying to reach doesn’t mean you know how to live there. Creed became one of the biggest bands in the world incredibly quickly, and everything that came with that success got tangled up with four people who were still trying to figure themselves out while millions of people were watching. Going higher wasn’t the end of the story. In a lot of ways, it was where some of the hardest parts started.
Eventually they came back down, and for a long time it looked like that was where Creed‘s story ended. Except everybody kept going.
None of them found one place high enough that they could stay there forever.
I think that’s where “What’s This Life For” still quietly belongs in this ending, because after writing all of this, I’m not sure the answer was ever supposed to be one band, one career, or one version of a life.
That’s also why this Creed reunion feels different to me.
They’re not trying to climb back to where they were in 1999. They don’t need to. Mark doesn’t have to stop being the person Alter Bridge, Tremonti and Sinatra helped him become. Brian and Flip don’t have to forget twenty years of Alter Bridge. Scott doesn’t have to pretend the years away from Creed didn’t change him.
They can go back without going backward. I think that’s ultimately what I want the picture for this post to feel like too. The pose might come from “Higher.” The person standing there doesn’t.
And somehow all of those lives meet here again. Not because everything that happened in between has been erased, but because everything that happened in between is part of who walked back through the door.
For years, I think the most interesting part of Creed‘s story looked like how high they went and how hard everything became when they couldn’t stay there.
I’m starting to think I had the wrong part. They learned how to come back down. They built lives there. And somehow, after all of that, they learned how to go Higher together again.
Credits for everything can be found below, until the next one. Oh, and if you made it this far, you deserve a hint for what the next For The Record post is, so I’ll give you one. I feel like a monster…
“So let’s go there
Let’s make our escape
Come on, let’s go there
Let’s ask, “Can we stay?”
Can you take me higher
To a place where blind men see?
Can you take me higher
To a place with golden streets?”
Creed – Higher
Credits
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: Stray Dog HERVE EVOX TAN (V) NO BROWS ~ Gac Akina
Hair: [MFCNT] THOR Bun – Grooming Hair – LeBarbier Alpha
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Ear Tattoo: RichB. Ears Tattoo #08 ~ Salvy Hexem
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache – LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: PHYSIQUE X – Logan Facial Hair (v1) Tintable ~ PhysiqueX Resident ~ NEW @ Manhood (July 27-Aug 21)
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Torso Tattoo: Boscato Vigor Upper Body Tattoo MEDIUM – Boston Blaisdale
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Top: Mossu – Walter.Tank Top – Fatpack – Legacy M ~ AkiraKiyoi Resident
Pants: AVEC TOI – Placebo Trousers (Twilight Leather Pack) ~ Kelt Absinthe
Rings/Bracelets: *RE* Atreides Bracelet & Rings ~ Crashnoww Resident
Earrings: = DAE = SXD1 ~ Naomi Darkheart
~Scene~
Stage: [VORTECH] Concert Stage Matt V1.0 ~ Lexii Lane
Curtain: Spot On PBR Curtain 1.1 ~ Martin Yeats
Speakers: TIS Stage Speakers ~ Dancing Lemon
Pyro: TIS Stage Flames ~ Dancing Lemon
Drums: GCD – 9 Piece Heavy Rock Drum Kit (V2.3) ~ Supershine Zapedzki
Microphone: GCD – Vintage Microphone with Stand (V2.4) ~ Supershine Zapedzki
Pose: Black Dragon Custom ~ Lucky Icon
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