Creed's hugely popular comeback tour is rolling through the United States and Canada right now and nostalgia doesn't really explain the scale of demand this time. In fact, Mark Tremonti tells us the biggest fanbase is under 34 years old – which means they were probably too young to catch them when they released their second album Human Clay 25 years ago.
Away from the social media buzz that preceded the band's comeback in April, Creed's music is being appreciated and reappraised on a whole new level. Especially the first three albums they made with producer John Kurzweg; 1997's My Own Prison, 1999's Human Clay and 2001's Weathered. There's plenty of big songs spread between them, but in our new interview with Mark Tremonti he dug into another reason for their success; the band varied the tempos within songs.
"John was a gentleman, he was great," Tremonti says of Kurzweg – who the guitarist began tracking my Own Prison with when he was still in College and working part time in a Chili's Grill & Bar in Tallahassee. "And that was back when records were more raw and real. If you listen to the songs the tempos changed dramatically, so we weren't set to a permanent click. I think we were playing live when we recorded it, at least when the drums were recorded. We would play live, and then we would have to follow the tempo of those drums.
it's not like today where it's like, you're going to do this bar and you're gonna just do this lick, we'd have to play through massive portions of the songs and get them recorded back in the day
Kurzweg explained in a Produce Like A Pro video interview below how he would set the tempo for drummer Scott Phillips and the band to play to with a trusty old Alesis SR-16 drum machine. The ebb and flow of these tempos reflected a live feel.
"So it's not like today where it's like, you're going to do this bar and you're gonna just do this lick, we'd have to play through massive portions of the songs and get them recorded back in the day," explains Tremonti. "And I think it just felt, the more openness, the more the feel was more of a real live band playing."
It's something many listeners wouldn't even notice – unless you made the songs lock to a tempo and then it would become very apparent. It works for a lot of bands, but the rush and drag of some classics would suffer immensely from being locked to the grid.
"I think some people did some things with Van Halen [see below] where they put everything on a grid, and you saw how much it made it stale," notes Tremonti. "That record, Human Clay, and My Own Prison, and I believe Weathered were all just kind of loose and freeform. I think that's what made them sound the way they did and what made them special."
It's an approach Tremonti has kept with him in his other bands Alter Bridge (which also features Creed's Scott Phillips and bassist Brian Marshall) and Tremonti, alongside Creed's live guitarist Eric Friedman.
"Those songs do shift tempos quite a bit, which I like because certain parts push and pull. It gave them life – let them breathe," Tremonti tells us. "Nowadays when we're working with Elvis [Alter Bridge and Tremonti producer Michael 'Elvis' Baskette'], we do our best to make sure that the records still have this organic life. Not too scientifically put together to be perfect – it'll ruin the heart of a song.
"I think with a lot of music these days, a lot of people go way too far with making everything too 'perfect'', adds Tremonti. "It's super compressed. Everything's tuned, everything's put right on the grid. And I'd rather see a band play those same songs live and hear them be a little looser, and feel a little freer. But even live bands now are playing on these grids."
Another factor in Creed's huge success with Human Clay is how its songs were written with vocalist Scott Stapp – many during soundcheck in the increasingly huge venues Creed found themselves on from My Own Prison onwards. And in the case of a massive Human Clay hit, some of it was written during an actual live show jam.
Check out our interview with Mark Tremonti as we dig into that and much more.
