Interview
Interview
Stage Times: Myles Kennedy
From opening for a puppet show to rocking the Royal Albert Hall – Myles Kennedy remembers the highlights and lowlights of his gig history
The beauty of a solo project is that it allows an artist to deviate from the material they’re known for to try something different. That’s the path Alter Bridge’s Myles Kennedy had taken, putting down the electric guitar in favour of an acoustic one on his 2018 solo debut Year Of The Tiger, and juggling both for 2021’s sprawling, Southern rock inspired follow-up The Ides Of March. For his third album, however, he wanted to get louder. “I was like, ‘You know what? I just want to turn up and make a rock record.’ I just wanted to turn up and play some riffs and sing over the top of that,” Kennedy says.
The resulting record, The Art Of Letting Go, is a chunky, maximalist ode to the fiercest kind of rock ‘n’ roll. On paper, it might seem only a few shades away from his usual output with Alter Bridge or with Slash as part of The Conspirators, but there are still clear distinctions between this and those projects.
“The formula is similar, because you’ve got riffs holding down the fort, and you’re singing over the top of them, and you’ve got loud guitars. Those are definitely part of the equation with the other two bands,” Kennedy explains. “So for me, the main difference between this and Alter Bridge is just how much of it’s informed by a lot of the blues rock and classic rock that I listened to growing up, whereas Alter Bridge has got more of a modern rock, metal sound. I didn’t want to veer into that territory with this record. I think stylistically, at times, it’s closer to Slash, but the caveat is that Slash is Slash. Slash plays a certain way and I definitely don’t play that way. You need Slash in the equation for it to sound like that so I wasn’t too concerned in that respect.”
Ahead of the album, and a UK headline run with Devin Townsend coming up in November and December, Kennedy walks us through some of the most memorable gigs of his career.
The gig that made me want to make music
“One of my earliest memories of a rock show was going to see Monsters of Rock. This was like the late 80s, and it was Van Halen, Scorpions and Metallica. Dokken was on the bill and a band called Kingdom Come. That was the first festival I’d ever been to as a kid. It was massive, especially for the town I lived in, in Spokane. That was a big deal. Seeing that [made me think], ‘Oh yeah, this is pretty cool. I wouldn’t mind doing that.”
The first
“It was called The Drug-Free Rock Off. It was in Spokane at a place called The Convention Center, and it was a battle of the bands [for high schoolers]. I was in this band where all five of us kind of sang and each guy would sing a song in this contest. I was singing ‘Rock And Roll’ by Led Zeppelin. Keep in mind, I’m just little. I hadn’t even hit puberty yet, so my voice is super high and was really nervous because I’d never performed with a guitar, let alone sing. I’d never sang a lead vocal in front of anybody. It went really well. Actually, it was a fun thing, and I have good memories of it, but I didn’t sing again. ‘I just was like, Okay, well, that was fun’, but then I just wanted to play guitar.”
So how did you end up starting to sing again?
“It was really out of necessity, because when I started writing songs in my early 20s, I just couldn’t find a singer, and I was like, ‘Well, I think I’m gonna have to just do this myself’. I wasn’t hardwired for it initially, like I just wanted to play guitar, but I had these songs I wanted to perform and record. And I was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna just step up and do this.’”
The smallest
“I was in this band called Bittersweet, with Zia [Uddin], the drummer on these solo records. He’s the artist that I’ve had the longest relationship with. We’ve been playing together for nearly 40 years, which is crazy, and he’s an amazing drummer. But we had this band… We were in high school, I think, and we played at this punk rock club called 123 Arts and we rehearsed upstairs. On the weekend, sometimes you got to play shows downstairs, but I remember some of those, hardly anyone showed up. I remember that we were all a little humbled, but we were just desperate to play.”
The biggest
“That would probably be Rock In Rio, just hundreds of thousands of people. That was eight years ago with Alter Bridge and it was cool, but I will say this, it was tough for me, because I ended up getting pretty sick. I had a really bad respiratory infection. It’s a helpless feeling as a singer when you know you can’t go out and deliver to the best of your abilities, but another thing when you know you’re about to do it in front of more people than you ever have played for, and it’s televised throughout Brazil… That was tough, to say the least, but unfortunately nature was making it hard for me. I just had to go up there and smile and pretend like everything was fine.”
The weirdest
“It’s very Spinal Tap, but we might have opened for a puppet show… I don’t even remember which band it was, it was something along those lines, but it was full-on Spinal Tap. There was some children’s thing going on, and we were on the bill. I don’t know, this was a long time ago, but once again, there’re so many weird situations that we’ve been put in where you’re like, ‘How the hell did this happen?’”
The worst
“Going back to that 123 Arts place, that punk rock club, I remember one gig in particular where nothing was going well. I remember looking up – and keep in mind, this is 35 years ago – I looked up at the lighting rig and I was like, ‘I need to figure out what I’m gonna do with [my life]. This isn’t gonna work’. I was still a teenager, but I was so crestfallen and just so heartbroken, and just nothing was going right.”
The best
“If you ask all of us in Alter Bridge, you’ll get the same answer and that would be when we played the Royal Albert Hall with the Parallax Orchestra. That was amazing. That was just like a really special two nights. A, getting to play the Royal Albert Hall, and B, just feeling the power of a symphony. That was killer.”
Myles Kennedy starts his UK and Ireland tour this November. Find tickets here
Photo by Matthew Baker/Getty Images
