Alter Bridge
With a live-plus-rarities album, Albert Hall shows and solo Myles Kennedy material on the horizon, it’s a busy 2017 and beyond.
With a new mega live album (including rarities) and shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the way, it’s a busy time for Myles Kennedy and co.
Myles Kennedy has a ‘to do’ list that would make lesser rock stars blanch. Between his duties as the frontman with Alter Bridge and his long-gestating solo career, Kennedy has made sure his diary is clear for the rest of 2017 and beyond.
Last year Alter Bridge played their biggest ever headlining show, at London’s 18,000-capacity O2 Arena. In October the band release a live album recorded at the gig, the not-so-cryptically titled Live At The O2 Arena + Rarities. An old-school ‘greatest hits’ set in all but name, it’s the sound of a band reaching a new pinnacle.
“There was a lot of weight before that show, a lot of gravity knowing we were playing our biggest show,” says Kennedy. “You tend to go in with a certain amount of anticipation. It was just a huge sigh of relief when we hit the last chord: ‘Okay, I think we made it through this unscathed.’”
The Rarities part of the package brings together tracks that Alter Bridge have recorded for various international versions of their five albums to date, as well as a pair of previously unreleased tracks: Cruel Sun and Solace.
“We had all these songs hanging around in different places, so we figured we’d collect them all together,” the singer explains. “We put
together the book for it, and I’m thinking: ‘I don’t even remember the lyrics to this one.’ I had to sit down and try to decipher them all.”
The new live album coincides with two shows the band will play at London’s Royal Albert Hall, for which they’ll be joined by an orchestra, in the grand tradition of Deep Purple’s Concerto For Group And Orchestra and Metallica’s S&M. While Kennedy is excited about experiencing the “sonic assault” of a live orchestra, he concedes that there are potential pitfalls.
“It’s tricky every time you bring an orchestra into a rock environment – you have to be careful how you treat it,” he says. “There will probably be a fair amount of deeper cuts in the set-list, some that we’ve never even played live. We’ll probably start to incorporate some of those into our set, just so the band is familiar with them. It would be disastrous if we don’t have our act together.”
Alter Bridge certainly won’t be the only thing occupying Kennedy’s time in 2017. The bad news is that he’s scrapped the solo album he’s been talking about for the past few years. The good news is that he’s written another one entirely from scratch.
“As a songwriter, songs have a shelf life in terms of where you were in life when you wrote them. I decided back in December that I wasn’t going to put it out. That’s when I started working my ass off doing another one. So I assembled another twenty-five songs that I’m sitting on.”
According to Kennedy, the new tracks are more stripped-down and organic. “I set out parameters in terms of what I could use as a writer. I had my 1944 Gibson J-45 and an early-30s National Triolian Resonator – they were pretty much the two guitars I used for inspiration. There’s definitely a blues vibe to it, but at the same time I was listening to a lot of Nick Drake.”
He’s cagey about details – no album or song titles – but he does reveal that it will be based on a very specific theme: “It’s documenting what my mother and brother and I went through when my father passed away when I was a kid. It talks about that journey, and our exodus from Boston. It’s a very personal record.”
“We had all these songs hanging around so We figured We’d collect them all together.”
Myles Kennedy
ETA: Live At The O2 Arena + Rarities is released on September 8