The End Is Here: Mark Tremonti discusses heaviness, Sinatra and his new album

The End Is Here: Mark Tremonti discusses heaviness, Sinatra and his new album

- By Dan Franklin

The prolific songwriter details his discovery of heavy music, his ongoing obsession with chasing down the perfect song and how clarity and finality intersect on his latest solo record, 'The End Will Show Us How'. 

We need to talk about Mark Tremonti. Since 1997, he has released no fewer than 19 albums. Four of these are with Creed, who went stratospheric in the late nineties, sold over 50 million copies worldwide and today have 11.5 million monthly Spotify listeners. Seven albums are with Alter Bridge, in which he found recognition as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation. Not far behind, he’s released six albums under the Tremonti solo-project moniker since 2012, the latest of which is The End Will Show Us How.

We need to talk about how, despite all this, Mark Tremonti still seems underrated. He's been happy to play “in the shadows” alongside singer Scott Stapp in Creed, whom he describes as a “captivating” frontman. Alter Bridge afforded Tremonti the chance to step in front of the microphone, belting out a verse of “Words Darker Than Their Wings” alongside singer-guitarist Myles Kennedy on 2010’s AB III. Together, they composed what many see as the greatest guitar solo of all time, on 2007’s “Blackbird”.

We need to talk about how damn heavy Tremonti’s music is. Toe-to-toe with any of the bludgeoning 300-pound-gorilla bands in hardcore and metal, the piledriving “One More Time” from his new album lands a knockout punch. And that’s before the monstrous guitar solo.

 

“When I was a kid, all I wanted was the heaviest stuff ever,” says Tremonti from a hotel room on a day off from his current European tour. “Well, when I was a young kid, I was listening to seventies soft rock with mom and dad. Then as I grew older, I found the Metallica Master of Puppets record. That was the first record that really made me go, ‘Ooo, what's this stuff?’ And then I found Slayer’s Reign in Blood. And that was really [heavy]. Then I found Celtic Frost, and I just went down the rabbit hole and found the heaviest, darkest, meanest stuff I could find.”

That darkness has provided the shade on the underside of everything he's written since. Even in Creed, with their religious overtones and radio-rock anthems, Tremonti’s backing vocal on “My Own Prison”, from their first album, gave their music a brooding quality. Creed opened their set at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City with the scabrous “Bullets”. Tremonti was smuggling elements of extreme metal through the most mainstream channels. He did the same when he referenced Celtic Frost song “Circle of the Tyrants” on Alter Bridge track “Waters Rising” from 2013's Fortress, the first he sang fully as a lead vocalist.

By that time, Tremonti had already recorded and released his first album under his own name. Written during a three-month break in Alter Bridge’s touring schedule, 2012’s All I Was showcased his love of breakneck thrash (“Wish You Well”) and anthemic stompers (“You Waste Your Time”). But even then, Tremonti’s songwriting prowess showed a more rounded side to the material than one-dimensional extremity.

 

On “The Things I’ve Seen”, a searing ballad, Tremonti sang, “Sore again is this old wound/It overshadows everything”. Vulnerability and pain were on display, just as they are on The End Will Show Us How ballad “It’s Not Over”, where the narrator admits to having “built the cage that’s trapped me here”. It’s one of his favourite songs to perform on the current tour and is getting a big reaction when he does. Tremonti’s solo material seems to be a depository for personal damage, whether it's his own or invented.

“It’s therapeutic to be able to write and be as personal as it can be sometimes,” says Tremonti. “But sometimes when it's very personal sounding, maybe it's about somebody else – you never know. I won't be too direct on which songs are actually personal and which ones aren't, because I think when you do write a personal-sounding song, it becomes more personal to the listener.”

Over the thirty years Tremonti has been writing music he’s amassed a huge number of song ideas on laptops and tape recorders. When it comes to embarking on a new album for any project, he trawls the material, from first to last, to earmark suitable musical ideas. He is relentlessly prolific.

“It's an addiction,” he confesses. “Ever since I was a kid, I got my four-track recorder, and you create something from nothing. Then you present it to people, and you see the reaction, and you get to write the music you love. You're constantly chasing that perfect song. Nobody will ever write the perfect song, but you'll chase that thing till you die. Even when you have your first big breakthrough song you never scratch that itch. It's always going to be there.”

 

He had the main guitar motif of the title track of The End Will Show Us How on one of those recordings and painstakingly built the song around it. Sometimes it takes days, or weeks, or even months, for him to finish a track. Another song, “The Bottom”, has a verse and chorus which is over 25 years old. The track is unusual for the Tremonti project, with its rhythmic bounce and keen melodicism. Tremonti remembers writing the chorus as a kid, albeit with different lyrics: “I'm getting too old not to take these old ideas that I've loved all these years and get them out there.”

Now fifty years old, Tremonti doesn’t look like he’s aged five years since his time in Creed in his early and mid twenties. This must have helped take fans back on Creed’s huge North American tour last year, celebrating 25 years since the uber-selling Human Clay. He saw the raw emotion on the faces of those in the crowd hearing the songs for the first time, or since the band’s last live forays after reunion album Full Circle in 2009. Many grown men and women were in tears each night.

The End Will Show Us How was recorded, mixed and mastered before last year’s Creed tour. It followed hard on the heels of Tremonti’s most audacious project, an album recorded with members of Frank Sinatra’s band, 2022’s Mark Tremonti Sings Frank Sinatra. 100% of the proceeds of the album went to the National Down Syndrome Society. Tremonti’s daughter, Stella, was born with Down syndrome. Inspired by Sinatra’s own billion-dollar-plus fundraising for charity, Tremonti donned a sharp suit and threw himself into morphing into a new incarnation of the Chairman of the Board.

The results were as astonishing as anything he's achieved with Creed or Alter Bridge. Perhaps as surprising is how much Ol’ Blue Eyes has influenced Tremonti’s solo work. It taught him not to be afraid of the lower registers of his voice, singing in a rich baritone which is more like his speaking voice. As he puts it, younger vocalists tend to go all out, to be a “larger-than-life character”. Ironically perhaps, inhabiting the guise of one of the most iconic singers of the twentieth century helped Tremonti to sing more as himself.

“‘I'll Take My Chances’ on the record used to have a different melody in the verse,” says Tremonti. “When I listened back to it, I didn't like it, because I was pushing the whole time. The whole time I was at the top of my range. So when the chorus came in, it was actually lower than the verse. I wasn't feeling it. At the time I was learning the song called ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ that Frank Sinatra performed. And I just thought, let me try to just ease into this with that in mind. And that's how I carried the verse for ‘I'll Take My Chances’. That was probably the biggest direct influence, as far as songwriting goes, of doing the Sinatra stuff.”

When he performs his Sinatra sets, Tremonti feels comfortable carrying the show and telling the stories behind the songs. But when it comes to feeling like a fully fledged frontman in Tremonti, he’s still finding his feet. He’s not the natural hype man. In fact, he’s disarmingly polite and, despite his muscular physical presence, understated. 

 

“The frontman thing is not something you can get on YouTube and be like, ‘How to become a good frontman’,” he laughs. “You have to get up there and be in front of people, and sometimes be uncomfortable to see what works.”

But Tremonti has watched and learned what it takes to be an all-rounder. He’s studied how Myles Kennedy works on his vocal phrasing in songs: his vowel placement and enunciation. By his own admission, Tremonti used to go into the studio and deliver his vocals “like a caveman”. Recently, he is more diligent. He wouldn’t lay down a guitar solo without practising it, so now he treats tracking vocals with the same respect. 

Alter Bridge is a curious band where Kennedy and Tremonti’s talents vocally, and in their guitar-playing, are scrutinised in sometimes inverse proportion to the pressures they feel performing.

“Myles and I joke all the time,” says Tremonti. “Myles loves doing guitar solos. I love singing because nobody's judging me for my singing. Everybody's judged me as a guitar player for the last 30 years. Everybody judges Myles as this great singer. So when he plays a great guitar solo, they’re like, ‘Oh man, look how great of a guitar player he is.’ And actually he was a guitar player before he was a singer. I love singing because there's no pressure there. I'll go and sing in front of a million people and not break a sweat.”

We need to talk about the fact that there are two Mark Tremontis. There is “overground” Mark Tremonti, straddling arenas in Creed, with pyrotechnics and huge video screens. Then there is “underground” Tremonti trawling the clubs and small theaters of Europe, bringing the sledgehammer down on his audiences. 

He also knows when best to summon the underground Tremonti. He's not about to chuck “Throw Them to the Lions”, from 2018's A Dying Machine, at the Alter Bridge rhythm section.

“Scott Phillips [Creed/Alter Bridge drummer] has the best pocket and the best feel in the world, but he's not somebody that's gonna be playing for Dream Theater,” says Tremonti. “He's not a super over-the-top technical player. It doesn't suit him. He's great at what he does.”

After A Dying Machine, which had an accompanying sci-fi novel written by Tremonti and John Shirley, he has the bug for tying the disparate strands of his songs together thematically. Perhaps pulling from recordings reaching back a quarter of a century has put him in a reflective mood, because The End Will Show Us How contemplates The End itself in many of its songs.

“So I thought it would be clever to take the title and then go back through all the lyrics and see if I could tie elements and themes of ‘The End’ throughout the lyrics,” says Tremonti. “With that in mind, if you went back and looked at all the lyrics on this record, you'll see The End brought up a lot.”

“I like to say that The End is the great clarifier,” he continues. “Whatever decisions you make in life, you're going to see if they were the right ones on your deathbed. You're going to see it at the end of life. The best clarity you can have is after you've lived your life; if your decisions were correct or not. So that's what The End will show us.”

Before I leave our call and brood on this further, I have to ask Tremonti about Downshifter – a band he was rumoured to be discussing forming in the 2000s with Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta and Slipknot’s Joey Jordison. Years later, he used the name for a fictional heavy-metal band depicted by Jim Henson-style puppets which emerged on YouTube.

“The rumors kind of got out of hand,” he says of the original mooted project. “It's hard for me to remember, but I've spoken to Jamey a million times, doing his podcast and stuff. What a great guy. And I've done a lot of festivals where Hatebreed has performed. And then with Joey Jordison, I used to have a girl that worked for Creed back in the day, who was dating Joey. Through her conversations with him, I would just kind of say, ‘Hey, say hi: tell him I'm into this band, I'm into that band.’ And we would just talk about what metal bands we were into together. But I don't know how the whole band thing came about.”

A musician as busy and addicted to his craft as Mark Tremonti is not about to downshift his creative activities any time soon. He’s truly a multidimensional modern heavy-rock musician, whose ability to write ballads and brick-heavy riffs enthrals as much as it might alienate different sectors of his fanbase. 

Tremonti finds there are tribes even within his solo-project audience who love/loathe the heavier or softer side of what he’s doing, depending on who he’s talking with. The confidence to adopt these different guises is the key to what makes him such an interesting artist. I doubt when he looks back that Mark Tremonti worries about the roads not taken, but instead is impatient to make his next move. The End can wait for another day.

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The End Will Show Us How, the sixth solo album from Tremonti is now available via Napalm Records. Get the album - HERE

Catch the band currently on The End Will Show Us How Tour, trekking through Europe. See the list of dates and cities below. 

The End Will Show Us How Tour 2025

01/27/25 – Milan, IT – Magazzini Generali
01/28/25 – Vienna, AT – Szene
01/30/25 – Munich, DE – Technikum
01/31/25 – Frankfurt, DE – Zoom
02/01/25 – Cologne, DE – Kantine
02/02/25 – Amsterdam, NL – Melkweg
02/03/25 – Tilburg, NL – O13
02/05/25 – Bristol, GB – O2 Academy
02/06/25 – Glasgow, GB – SWG3 Galvanizers
02/07/25 – Belfast, GB – Limelight 1
02/09/25 – Dublin, IE – Academy
02/11/25 – Birmingham, GB – O2 Institute
02/13/25 – Manchester, GB – O2 Ritz
02/14/25 – London, GB – O2 Forum Kentish Town
02/16/25 – Paris, FR – Alhambra
02/17/25 – Antwerp, BE – Trix

 












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