Sometimes bands go to extreme lengths to make a first impression. Alter Bridge almost killed themselves to make theirs.
“Shooting our first music video was nuts,” guitarist Mark Tremonti remembers. “We shot it up in the mountains and as we were going way up, tons and tons of trees were getting cut down. It felt like you were gonna die, it was so cold and dirty.”
“It was filmed up in the Pacific Northwest, a few hours from where I lived,” frontman Myles Kennedy continues. “Maybe my new bandmates were afraid Bigfoot was going to make an appearance.”
The music video in question was for Open Your Eyes, the lead single of the Floridian alt metal band’s 2004 debut album, One Day Remains. It would be the first song released by Mark, bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips since announcing the split of their platinum-selling, post-grunge band Creed just a week earlier.
At that point, Myles was a relative unknown, his previous band, The Mayfield Four, barely making ripples in the wider rock world. Yet suddenly, he was thrust in front of Creed’s massive fanbase to effectively replace beleaguered frontman Scott Stapp after years of substance abuse had soured his relationship with the band. But rather than just hiring a new singer and continuing under the Creed banner, Mark, Brian and Scott decided to form a new band and attempt to reach the mountaintop once again.
“We saw the end of Creed coming,” Mark says. “It was a tough time and we were in survival mode. And of course, you had the people going, ‘You know, Mark, when bands break up, it’s usually the singer who goes on to future success and the band will just disappear.’”
In 2026, it’s obvious that Alter Bridge have made it. Hammer is talking to the band in a swanky West London hotel. They’ve been comfortably playing arenas for over a decade and released their self-titled eighth album in January. But, back in the early 2000s, the undertaking was a monstrous gamble.
Stacking the odds against Mark, Brian and Scott even further was the fact that Creed were, if anything, over-exposed in North America. Megahits such as With Arms Wide Open and Higher were played, over-played, then played a bit more, to the point that the band had as many weary detractors as they did ardent fans.
By 2003, music magazines couldn’t stop writing about the friction within the line-up. Reporter after reporter obsessed over Stapp’s substance addictions and mental health problems, as well as the expanding wedge between him and his bandmates. A handful of fans even sued the singer for his apparently abysmal performance at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois. But the negative attention wasn’t enough to faze Mark.
“Music is all I’ve ever dreamed of doing,” the guitarist says with the tone of someone explaining why they keep breathing. “I had no back-up plan.”
Before Creed had even packed it in, Mark convened with Brian and Scott and started coming up with future Alter Bridge material. One Day Remains tracks such as the moody Broken Wings and sentimental Down To My Last came along quickly, but the trio still needed a frontman. Luckily, Mark was a fan of The Mayfield Four – especially their wiry-sounding tenor vocalist, who was nothing like the Eddie Vedder-ish baritone the guitarist had just worked alongside.
Unbeknownst to Mark, Myles had stepped back from music before he reached out. The Mayfield Four had broken up, he was struggling with tinnitus, and he was sick and tired of rock industry bullshit.
“It was very disturbing initially, especially mentally,” the singer says of his chronic hearing condition. “The biggest concern was maintaining the hearing quality that I still had. Fortunately, since I’m very careful with how loud I listen to music, I’ve managed to keep it in check.”
Myles was so done at the time that he even declined an offer from Slash to sing in what became Velvet Revolver (they fortunately reconnected as Slash put his solo band together in 2010).
“It was very difficult to turn that opportunity down,” he reflects. “Though my friends might have thought that I was crazy, I knew that I wasn’t mentally prepared, at least at that stage, to jump into something of that magnitude and do it justice.”
What was it, then, that got him back in the saddle to collaborate with Mark and co?
“Enough time had passed,” he answers. “There was a limited amount of music written at that point, but I could recognise from the beginning that this was potentially something that would be appropriate for my voice and songwriting approach.”
The foursome christened themselves Alter Bridge – taking the name from an actual bridge in Mark’s hometown of Detroit, Michigan – and signed with Creed’s former label, Wind-Up. Even though Mark, Brian and Scott were in a new band, they still had contractual commitments to the label. Myles calls writing the lion’s share of One Day Remains, including Open Your Eyes, “relentless”.
“I got off the plane late on January 2, 2004 and went straight to Mark’s house, where we got to work,” he recalls of that time. “The dynamic was focused and intense for the next few months. Mark and I recognised that we were both hardwired with a strong work ethic.”
Open Your Eyes had more in common with Creed than later Alter Bridge material. It was a sentimental alt metal banger, while its lyrics expressed the same sense of courage against adversity found in many, many Creed songs. ‘Will they open their eyes and realise we are one?’ Myles sang. ‘On and on we stand alone, until our day has come.'
“It was a good starting point,” the vocalist says now. “With that said, it certainly didn’t define the band in the long run.” Mark and Myles worked on the chorus together, but in the guitarist’s view, his songwriting partner’s greatest contribution was the ‘whoaoh-oh-oh-oh-ohh-ing’ bridge section.
“I was playing probably my favourite part of the song, through the bridge, and Myles did this falsetto thing,” he remembers. “I sang the bridge melody and then he just kept on going with something else. He was about to overlook it and move on, but I was like, ‘That’s something special, what you just did.’”
During Alter Bridge concerts, that part is now a must-play moment, uniting thousands of fans a night in wordless but emotional vocalising. At time of writing, Open Your Eyes has made the band’s setlists over 600 times. In a seemingly prescient move, Mark advocated for making the song the first Alter Bridge single.
“I thought it was the one,” he explains. “It just felt good to me. It felt like everything we’re about.”
Creed announced their breakup on June 4, 2004. Open Your Eyes came out just one week later on June 11. The song fared well for an opening statement, reaching number two on the US Mainstream Rock chart. When One Day Remains followed on August 10, it achieved the similarly respectable ranking of number five on the Billboard 200. Yet it wasn’t the same as the number ones and twos Creed’s albums had drummed up, and Wind-Up immediately got impatient.
“As soon as they saw that it wasn’t going to be a cash cow like Creed were, in my opinion, they took their foot off the gas,” says Mark. “You didn’t see the promotion. It just all went away.”
The guitarist believes that the label withdrew their support as a way to pressure the band into reuniting with their former singer.
“Maybe they thought, ‘Because this isn’t going to be successful, let’s not even make it somewhat successful, so they’ll get back in Creed,’” he continues. “It’s just my opinion, but I remember, Find The Real was our second single. It was doing well at radio and then, all of a sudden, we would talk to local radio promoters and they’d be like, ‘The label is not pushing for us to play it.’”
Alter Bridge bought their way out of their Wind-Up contract in 2006, and Mark claims the bill was so hefty that the band didn’t finish paying it until “two or three years ago”. Their second album, Blackbird, came out via Universal Republic in 2007 and only reached number 13 in the States – a decline the band attribute to Creed fatigue.
However, Blackbird flew in the UK, reaching number 37, where One Day Remains had scored a measly 102. “It was nice to know that there was a place on the planet that embraced AB 2.0,” Myles says. “We took a big chance and fortunately found an audience that continues to grow two decades later.”
Open Your Eyes may not represent Alter Bridge as they sound today, but it was a vital first step all the same. For Mark, it was an against-all-odds victory which let him shake off the draining controversies of Creed. And as for Myles, it was his chance to step into the spotlight as one of rock’s best vocalists.
“It was the portal into a new chapter,” the frontman says about the whole affair. “Once we stepped through it, it allowed us to discover the next phase of an adventure that continues to this day.”
Alter Bridge's new, self-titled album is out now via Napalm. The band play Sonic Temple in May and host in the inaugural Blackbird Festival in Cardiff on June 27.
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