One night in 1998, Myles Kennedy was almost killed in Lordsburg, New Mexico. At the time, he was on tour fronting The Mayfield Four, supporting Creed at the start of their ascent to superstardom. Darkness fell over the bare desert town as they hurtled onwards in their 15-passenger Ford Club Wagon. Suddenly there were flames behind them. It was a dramatic turn for Kennedy, a guitar teacher back home in Spokane until he joined The Mayfield Four in ’96. His thirtieth birthday was still a year or so away.
“Our tour manager, who was driving, you hear him just yell: ‘Hold on boys!’” Kennedy recalls today. “He’s holding the steering wheel for dear life. I turn around, and I see the trailer, and I see sparks and fire in the back. It turns out the whole axle of the trailer fell off going, you know, seventy-five miles an hour. Fortunately it didn’t flip. But yeah, that could have been it.”
In the end The Mayfield Four missed part of the tour and were stuck in town for a week, waiting for parts. It was a desolate setting. An in-between rest stop on Interstate 10 lined with budget motels, gas stations and not a lot else. “I remember as we were driving in,” Kennedy says, “one of the hotels said: ‘Yes, we do have colour TV!'"
Meanwhile, in a proper tour bus some miles ahead, his future bandmates guitarist Mark Tremonti, bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips geared up for another show in the band that would make them rich and famous. Kennedy didn’t meet their then-frontman – the charismatic, if somewhat divisive, Scott Stapp – during those shows. He did, however, meet Tremonti and Phillips, sowing seeds for a friendship that’s kept Alter Bridge running for more than 20 years.
“Brian was off running in the forest or something, right?” Tremonti says of Marshall, who battled alcohol addiction for years on the back of Creed’s success (he’s been sober since 2012). “He was a wild man back in the day. He was an unpredictable guy, but he’s the best.”
“Yeah, we do love Brian. Brian’s something special,” Kennedy says, smiling, with genuine affection. “But I think I met Stapp in 2012, at some festival we did in the Midwest. It was real brief. We did a photo.”
Alter Bridge have never had the megabucks stats of Creed, but you sense it was never their goal. There’s something of that desert experience in the steady, quietly fearless drive they share – enjoying the ride, rogue fires and all. It’s put them in rooms with Slash, Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra’s band. In 2025 it sent them all to Beverly Hills, where they worked on their latest album in Eddie Van Halen’s 5150 studio.
Even so, in light of Creed’s enormously successful reunion shows (which began in 2024, with more planned for 2026) there were whispers that Alter Bridge would fold. That the resurgence of love for Creed would unseat these unfailingly approachable guys. Over coffee today their leading pair come across like people you might meet in your local guitar shop.
Sitting in an elegant hotel suite in West London – where he and Tremonti are doing promo for the eighth Alter Bridge record, titled simply Alter Bridge – Kennedy is wholly unlike Creed’s chestpumping vocalist. Less all-American muscle and sun tan, more bookish North West muso in his trendy glasses and denim jacket. There’s a quiet comfort between him and the bandmate sitting next to him.
Very ‘metal’, but cosy in a black hoodie, with close-cropped hair, Tremonti betrays little of the stardom that came with his first band. Or the slower, steadier but no less worthy gains in Alter Bridge, its line-up unchanged for more than 20 drama-free years. He misses his family, and his 18 pinball machines, back home in Florida.
Creed’s ride was notoriously less smooth, with lows to match their staggering peaks. Tremonti’s resulting tensions with Stapp are well documented. He’s too much of a class act to be anything short of gracious today, speaking only of the delight in seeing so many young fans at these sold-out Creed shows – waves of them pulled in through TikTok and other social channels. It all feels genuinely good-spirited, and for now that seems to be keeping band relations in similar nick.
“It’s fun for all of us, because it feels so different, you know?” Tremonti muses, on the subject of the two frontmen he now works with. “They’re both fun, but Myles and Scott, they couldn’t be any more different,” he says, a flash of intent crossing his face, “in every way.”
Anyone who’s seen Alter Bridge live will know that underestimating them (for their ‘niceness’ or anything else) is a mistake. Now, with Alter Bridge, there’s a sense of the band returning to their source. Coming full circle, you might say. Shedding excess skin after years of juggling band life with escalating solo projects and other groups.
There are moody, heavy shades of Alter Bridge III there. Fortress’s anthemic melodies. A singalong live favourite in-waiting, in the form of the bighearted ballad Hang By A Thread. An urgency that speaks to the shadier sides of modern life. The sounds of a band remembering what defined them. Channelling their most fiery qualities, confident in their name alone. It’s left a degree of badassery in all these new songs.
“From record to record, we might try some new things, integrate some new textures, production ideas,” Kennedy says, “but it always ends up where there’s this one thread that runs throughout all the records. And so I think this record just leans into that. Like, what we’re going to try this time is just home in on the thing we do, and stay there, and be proud. Don’t be ashamed of it. Just embrace it, you know? So a self-titled approach made total sense,” he finishes with a shrug, “because that’s what this is – it’s us.”
In person Kennedy and Tremonti have the easy demeanour of the genuinely content – with faint crackles of their quietly fierce work ethic, and their respective darker sides. Now 56 and 51, they’re still in love with writing music. They play for adoring fans in bands that stretch them in different ways. It’s a long way from those days of flaming tour van trailers in the desert.
Of course in other ways life is more complicated. When it came to writing lyrics for the new album, Kennedy found himself reflecting that. Observing the toxicity of our age – much of it stemming from online – themes of deception and burnout began to emerge, inspired by personal experiences and those of people around him. It’s all there in the gnarly oomph and darker palettes of tracks like Scales Are Falling and Disregarded.
“Oh gosh, there’s no shortage of inspiration,” he sighs. “And we’ve all been in this situation, and it seems like it’s just been perpetuated with social media and whatnot, as far as how messed up and how toxic things can be, people wanting to pull you into their drama, or a certain level of deception, people literally making things up…”
“Back in the day you could just walk away,” Tremonti adds. “You can’t walk away any more, because there’s these phones.” Kennedy doesn’t go into specifics, but the friction he describes feels familiar at this point. The sort of fall-outs and facades that thrive on social feeds and filter into the rest of our lives. Immersing himself in them took its toll. It impacted his life outside the band, as he toured festivals with his solo band. He lost ten pounds.
“I would not be honest if I told you that I went into it feeling great,” Kennedy says. “A lot of times, as a writer… I tend to kind of go there and stay there. It’s almost like method acting. It was starting to kind of beat me up psychologically.
“What Are You Waiting For, I remember finishing the lyrics on that and literally feeling sick to my stomach. I did not look healthy on this last [live] run I did. I was committed to it, let’s just put it that way. Then I spent the entire summer basically eating!” he says, laughing. “I come back after that tour, my friends are like: “You okay, brother? You look like shit!’”
The flipside, of course, was three weeks of writing and pre-production in 5150, the studio built by Eddie Van Halen and now under the stewardship of his son Wolfgang. The ties between Wolfgang and Alter Bridge are considerable. They’ve toured together. They share the same go-to producer/ collaborator, Michael ‘Elvis’ Baskette. Wolfgang played bass in Tremonti’s solo band from 2012 to 2016. When we talk, Kennedy is preparing to open for Wolfgang’s band, Mammoth, on their latest run of US dates.
As teenagers Kennedy and Tremonti had pictures of Eddie Van Halen in their bedrooms. Their hero’s influence fed into the heft, the scale, of the new music. Slave To Master – a nine-minute tale of dystopian AI in hard rock form – features their longest recorded guitar solo (split between Kennedy and Tremonti, and gratifyingly fat-free).
“I think the studio [5150] informed us in a lot of ways, and it inspired us,” Kennedy agrees. “Mark and I wanted to show up armed with our best ideas, our best riffs. The last thing either one of us wanted to do is walk into that sacred ground and tarnish its legacy.”
“You know, even in the long run, you [don’t] want to have a record that people say ‘they recorded this crap here?!’” Tremonti says with a laugh. “So we wanted it to be something that represents us showing respect for the space as well.”
Wolfgang’s presence also made it fun. He played them the new Mammoth album in full. For his birthday they all had pizza together at his house, a few paces away. One day his uncle, Alex Van Halen, dropped in to say hi.
“He was just like the guy next door,” Tremonti says. “Just a nice guy saying: ‘Hi, fellas!’ And of course his nephew is very close to him. So yeah, it’s just cool to be in that circle.”
“I mean, it’s crazy,” Kennedy says, turning to Tremonti. “If you told me in 1983, when I first heard Van Halen I that eventually you’re gonna be at the studio where they’re gonna do the next few records, and you’re gonna be talking with Alex Van Halen…”
At the core of the new record you have Kennedy and Tremonti not just nailing their main roles, but also relishing the instruments they’re less known (and therefore less judged) for: lead guitar work in Kennedy’s case, lead vocals for Tremonti. Album opener and first single Silent Divide epitomises this, setting the tone for the songs that follow. Built on a groovy, thrashy riff from Kennedy, with his and Tremonti’s vocals soaring into bittersweet chorus harmonies, it leans into the idea of facing division and taking the higher road.
“It’s totally liberating,” Tremonti enthuses of his spotlit singing moments, peaking on the tender yet upbeat Tested And Able. “I wouldn’t take it as personally if someone’s like: ‘Ooh, it doesn’t sound like he’s been working on his voice.’ Well I’m not the lead singer! I’m just having fun. You should hear me on karaoke.”
It was the late Frank Sinatra who brought Tremonti into his own as a singer. In 2022 he released Mark Tremonti Sings Sinatra, on which he was accompanied by Sinatra’s old band, in aid of America’s National Down Syndrome Society. His daughter Stella was born with the condition the previous year, setting a new mission for his life – raising funds and awareness. On tour with Creed, he’s brought her on stage as arenas filled with lit-up phones.
“She disarms everybody,” he says, smiling – really smiling. “I’ll go to a metal festival or something, and I’ll run into the most metal person and they’ll be all [puts on gruff bloke’s voice] ‘How’s Stella?’ She softens everybody.”
As a baby, Stella had life-saving heart surgery that wouldn’t have been available to her 20 years ago. She’s now five and completely healthy. It’s rewired Tremonti’s focus. It’s hard not to hear some of that in Alter Bridge.
“The world is in kind of a tough place,” he says, “but it is the best time to have a child with special needs right now, because there’s so many ways to communicate with other people. And the Down syndrome community is so supportive, and there’s inclusion now. It’s not like it was twenty years ago.”
For better or worse, Alter Bridge tend to come across as a serious band. Nice guys with good songs, but straight-shooting. Muscular riffs. Monochrome wardrobe. Not funny. Seemingly aware of this, early promo for the new record – with split rumours still percolating, as all things Creed gathered pace – revealed them in a new light. The teaser video ‘Somebody Better Call Kennedy’ on Instagram starred Kennedy hiding out (surrounded by Alter Bridge and Mammoth merch) at his mum’s in Spokane, Washington, in the room where The Mayfield Four’s bassist used to sleep.
“We thought it would be funny to make it look like I had no life,” Kennedy says, laughing, “And that I was just waiting for these guys to finish, because I think there’s some people who thought: ‘Oh, it’s over.’ And we were like: ‘What if we make it look like I’m this desperate musician who’s lost everything, and lives in his mom’s basement.’
“And that’s the thing,” he adds. “We never show a sense of humour. [But] we’re all goofy guys, but so much of our history is about being serious.”
Spokane, where Kennedy still lives, is almost three thousand miles from Florida. Brian Marshall lives in Pensacola, Florida’s ‘panhandle’ close to the Alabama border. Tremonti and Scott Phillips are a neighbourhood away from each other in Orlando, where they share a circle of friends.
“I mean, it’s amazing we’ve made it work,” Kennedy reflects. “It’s a long-distance relationship, but I think technology has helped it, especially creatively, so we can exchange ideas that way.”
“But we still see each other so much, you know?” Tremonti counters. “We see each other more than most of our family members.”
Juggling multiple projects, especially around such distances, is no small feat. Both Kennedy and Tremonti are increasingly conscious of where their time goes – of the days, weeks, months they won’t get back. In 2019 Kennedy toured for 300 days and it broke him. The following year, he learned that he enjoyed being at home. On the new album you’ll hear tastes of this in their pummelling, groovy ode to burnout, Power Down.
“It forces you to make tough decisions,” he says. “You probably have less time on this planet than you did prior, as you reach this point, so how are you going to spend the rest of that time?”
“When we’re six weeks into a tour, that’s when I start getting burned out if I don’t have my kids with me,” Tremonti says. “If I have my kids with me, it’s the best of both worlds. If I have a day off, like ‘you can go do whatever you want’, I’m going to play guitar, write songs or play with my kids.”
Even so, they agree that creating is still what motivates them. Producing something from nothing, that resonates in houses, headphones and venues across the world. The same compulsion that keeps them going, even when burnout threatens. Even when they’re probably doing a little bit too much. That slightly mad streak that perhaps all of rock’s true lifers have – that Alter Bridge have learned to channel sustainably.
“Yeah, that’s the part that makes it harder…” Kennedy grins ruefully. “You can’t escape that urge, that high. It’s a drug. There’s nothing like it. So you’re always going to be chasing that to some degree.”
Alter Bridge is out now via Napalm Records.
