Alter Bridge pick their five essential songs | Metal Hammer

You meet some of your heroes growing up and you expect them to be all rough and gruff and Thank it's the opposite. I think the more metal sometimes the nicer the people are. you Blackbird. That's easy, yeah. very Blackbird would probably be the top of the heap. much I mean, that's probably the song that took us longest to finish. for And I think in a lot of ways, having that song is probably the reason we're still here. Most important song of our career. Without a doubt. It's so far above anything else we're going to name in this, me. you know, the other four songs, because of the fact that we, that was during a period where we didn't know where we were going. We didn't know if we were going to get to make another record. First record had nothing like it. Nothing like it. And we really... We were adamant about finishing that song, but it was proving to be very difficult. The parts weren't coming, we just could not seem to seal the deal. I will never forget it, as long as I live, that afternoon when we finally, it happened really quick. I remember you had that awesome guitar part at the beginning, and I think we might have even had up to the and then we just couldn't figure out where to go from there. we were so excited about that we had going so far yeah and then um with six eight songs sometimes it's tough courses are different approach it's tougher yeah and that afternoon we finally got all the rest of the pieces put together and it came quick but it was it was a thing you dream of as a creative where you're like It's like the sky opens and all of the, you've been hitting your head against the wall. And then finally, it's like, it just, there's the door and you just open it and you just walk in and there it is. And I get goosebumps even, even, even talking about it. It was just such a, it was such a rush. So we finish and I, we used to record everything on my little laptop just to document it. So we went back to his house because I was basically living with them at the time. And I went back and listened to the work that we did that day. And I just called, I said, Mark, you got to come check this out, man. And we both sat there in the room I was staying in. And we were just like, I think that's when I knew. I was like, we just broke through a major. point in this band's evolution and and it's never been the same since. Well that you look at the opening track on the next record Slip to the Void and how spooky and mysterious that was you know that uh that wasn't going on in the first record either you know and and even even the whole Blackbird record was pretty much written Blackbird was the last song we wrote on that album um so the rest of the Blackbird record was a little moodier. It's one of my favorite records we've ever done, but Blackbird was really the standout track of that record as far as being something different that we hadn't done before. And from that moment on, it's like, how can we keep opening doors creatively with the band? Yeah, Metal Angus, that was off the first record. And that song, I think more than anything, anything, just because... You know, once your buddy Adam picked it up. Yeah. He was, you know, that was the gateway drug for so many fans. You know, I think if you probably asked a certain percentage of our fan base, how did you discover Alter Bridge? They would say Metal Angus through, you know. Through Edge, yeah. I've found through life that when you meet these people that are tough guy, like Metal or like Adam when he's on film. You meet him offstage, he's the nicest person you'll ever meet in your life. He's a Canadian. Usually Canadians are really nice and soft-spoken. Oh, OK. And I remember that when I was first touring over here in Europe playing with metal bands. And you meet some of your heroes growing up and you expect them to be all rough and gruff. It's the opposite. I think the more metal sometimes, the nicer the people are. I'm trying to remember, was isolation, did that go to, was that like a kind of a, yeah, that might have been our first, like, we're talking about how we kind of shunned radio and doing that. But that was one that we had enough of a success in that it helped, I guess, expose people to the band a little bit more. But, you know, the whole radio thing being different than it used to be, like it's not having that number one song. It still didn't outshine our other songs. Like a song like Rise Today that never, I don't know what it probably went to. Yeah, I think it did. Maybe a top ten song or something. But that's a song that if we didn't play it at a show, fans would probably think something was wrong with us. I'll never forget our agent at the time. We kind of had disappeared for a little bit. And I think people were like, oh, are they going to, because they've been gone long enough, because I think the first Creed reunion kind of happened. I think I'd been doing stuff with Slash at that point. I'm trying to remember the exact timeline. So I think some people were like thinking maybe we were left for dead at that point. And then I remember our agent at the time, we'd announced the tour, and suddenly it was selling really well. And I remember he said, you know, well, I guess distance makes the heart grow fonder. And I was like, yeah, I guess I was just, I was. Totally surprised. Yeah, right, that's one of my personal favorites. For me, that chorus is such an anthemic, easy to sing. It's funny because it's early on when we started working together. I remember... Mark would play some ideas that he had, and that's how it works. You know, as writers, you just kind of throw stuff back and forth. And I remember he kind of played it in passing, just like, hey, I've got this little thing, yeah, yeah. And then it went on to, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What was that? When you sing it like that, it sounds like a beach person. Yeah, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I stopped it, like, let's back up and play that again. And I remember, for me, like the first... Past with just hearing that idea, it was like, that's a big hook. We got to really hone in on that bad boy right there. And once again, I think there's some, I remember lyrically, it's a little bit of like, because I knew the magnitude of, I knew what that could be, right? So I remember, I don't know if I ever told you this, I must have rewritten that lyric 20 times. I mean I remember sitting at this little kitchen table at my at my house and just rewrite after rewrite after rewrite just beating beating it to a pulp and because I knew that that was going to be an important track um so um I'm happy with how it turned out and and there's it's it's great we just played a show the other day we did an acoustic thing in Germany it's a little at the like the Ramones what do they call a place it's really cool like a Ramones museum yeah it's really cool So we played the five songs we were supposed to play, but then a handful of people that were there were like, play another song. We're like, what should we do? And for me, I'm like, well, easy peasy. Let's just do Rise Day, because even if we screw it up, we haven't played in a while together, they'll know the, I can just sing, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll rise today. And it's just a great song to get everybody singing in the crowd. You can do, talk about In Loving Memory. Yeah, so I kind of consider those songs almost like when a queen would have one song play right before the next. I forget that there's the two of them that they do. There's a few medleys that you hear on the radio. I kind of think of Watch Over You and In Loving Memory because we always perform them together as a mood in itself. But In Loving Memory started, that was on the first record. We'll The first time we used the open G tuning, which turned into something that we've used a bunch over the years. be right Um, I wrote that song about my mother and it was, uh, it was a tough one to write. Like, um, talking about writing lyrics, I think I wrote enough lyrics for an entire back. record about that one. But, uh, but we've do that one live a lot. It's great for, for our, uh, set list to have dynamics. And that's when we'll come out, me and miles and we might change it up now, but cause we've done it so many times, but miles will come up and he'll do watch over you, um, by himself. And then I'll come up and do a in loving memory with him. That's, yeah, it's just a side of our songwriting that we like, the singer-songwriter stuff, the emotional ballad that we loved listening to when we were younger. And it's just a side of the melodic sensibility that we like to keep intact for the band, even if you hear some of these more metal-eating songs. Yeah. We're still saps for the melody. Every rocker has a soft spot. That's right.