The past few years have borne witness to a drastic resurgence in popularity for Creed, and that’s largely thanks to the fact one of their biggest hits has reached a new adoring audience.
The hit in question is Higher – a hard-riffing cut released in 1999 that has become the unofficial anthem for not one, but two sporting franchises.
The first is the Texas Rangers baseball team, who began belting out the track in order to overcome a mid-season slump. The team’s fortunes restored, the song was then enthusiastically adopted by the club’s fans, who sing it at home games.
In the NFL, the Minnesota Vikings used the track to similar effect. First, it was a dressing room anthem. Then it became a rallying cry for fans.
For Mark Tremonti and co, it became a harbinger of a new era for Creed, and helped showcase the mounting level of enthusiasm and demand there was for another reunion.
But as Tremonti and his bandmate Scott Stapp explain in the new issue of the Guitar World, the world-beating, passionately embraced, anthemic rallying cry that has mounted their resurgence had rather humble beginnings – and was originally written on the spot live during a gig.
“Scott liked to play this game where he would put the band on the spot and say, ‘We’re going to write a song,’” Tremonti says of the band’s writing approach. “In our college years, he would do that in front of a live audience at a club, and I would just start riffing out.
“The band would follow me and he’d start singing. The chorus of Higher was born that way. That song was written in front of a live group of people.”
Stapp clarifies that “group” totalled around 4,000 people, and comments the ultra-popular cut began life as a “freestyle”.
“I still like to do that – I’m sure the band guys around me hate it. But it’s fun and you get in a flow,” Stapp adds. “Mark can trigger me with some of his licks and interludes between songs. When I hear it, I roll with it. I’m glad Mark jogged my memory on that, because that’s how that chorus was born.”
Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World, which features the full interview with Tremonti and Stapp, as well as a celebration of the Stratocaster’s 70th Anniversary.
