Scott Phillips of Alter Bridge (INTERVIEW)

With the highly anticipated new record Fortress finally on store shelves, Alter Bridge has boom-boxed back with a triumph. Playing a sold out show earlier this month in Orlando, where three-fourths of the band live, they are now trekking across Europe and looking forward to a full-fledged tour on American soil in the new year.

With everyone having a busy 2012 – Myles touring with Slash; guitar player Mark Tremonti recording and touring with his solo band Tremonti; drummer Scott Phillips adding his sticks to Projected, John Connolly’s foray outside his Sevendust home; and bass player Brian Marshall, who played with Tremonti but took time off to be with his newborn son – it almost looked as if the band would not have any new music out for a long time. But the quartet was determined to again record music under the Alter Bridge moniker sooner rather than later. And what they have created is one hell of an album.

It’s not uncommon to get better with age but Alter Bridge has done so tenfold. The maturity of the songs, the pure sound of the musicianship, is almost unbelievable considering the circumstances of time apart and different musical adventures. As Phillips explained to me right before they left for Europe, they wanted to be “innovative and new” while not veering too far from the sound their fans love.

You just played in Orlando and you’re heading off to Europe. Why did you tease us with just one show in America?

We’re definitely planning on doing a full US tour, maybe in January or February-ish. I know that we’re scheduled to do the Soundwave tour in Australia, which starts at the end of February, but I think a decent amount of January and the early portion of February we’ll do a full-blown US tour. Just the way the schedule is set up, we knew that we were going to definitely hit Europe towards the end of this year and try to do what we can do to get the album released earlier to have time to do both the US and a European tour. But it’s just kind of where the chips fall, if you will, when it comes to labels and their schedules and what works for them. We certainly want to accommodate them and what we feel would be the best amount of time to set up the record and single and all that kind of stuff. We decided we were going to do a week’s worth of rehearsals here in Orlando and why not finish it with a show, a hometown show, if you will, to kind of cap it off and sort of get that first performance under your belt with what we’d hope would be a friendly crowd. And it went great. It was a lot of fun. I think we all really enjoyed it and there’s certainly room for improvement on our part. But everybody that saw it seemed to enjoy it.

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What do you think you have to work out?

Oh I don’t know. I mean, it’s been coming up on two years since the four of us have played together in the same band and been on stage. You can rehearse all you want for weeks and weeks and months or days or whatever but as soon as you get in front of a crowd, all bets are off. The songs that we played off Fortress are the first time we’ve played them for any type of crowd whatsoever. So just tighten it up a little bit. I don’t know if it’s anything fans would necessarily have noticed but we’re always our harshest critic and are always sort of striving for perfection.

How long will you be in Europe?

We are there for right about thirty days. Like twenty-two or twenty-three days, somewhere around there. A nice busy schedule but it will definitely be a lot of fun getting back over there and reconnect with some of those fans.

With Myles having been away for so long with Slash, how did you get this album made?

Well, we had just kind of finished up the last portion of the Creed tour that we had done last year. Myles was finishing up tours with Slash. So it’s been a lot of careful planning and trying to look at the calendar months, if not years, in advance and sort of scheduling time. “This is when we need you. Can you make it work?” Mark and Myles are both constant writers. And you have a ton of ideas that you come in with and just sort of bounce them off of each other. All four of us listen to their ideas, deciding what we think is cool and what’s worth working on. The first few days are extremely exciting cause you hear all these ideas that Myles has put together and some ideas that I hadn’t heard Mark put together up until that moment. I think everybody just has a natural excitement when the four of us get together and hear new music and try and think of the possibilities of where these songs can end up.

We were together through a decent amount of December and then all of January. During February, I think Myles was back out with Slash and Mark went out and did a run for his solo record. Then we all reconvened back in March and sat down with Elvis Baskette [producer] and went through several weeks of pre-production, two or three or four weeks, where we were in the studio the whole time, kind of working with him. Really felt like we got the songs the way we wanted them and started recording, I think, probably the middle of April, early to mid-April, I think. So yeah, up to this point, it’s been a lot of calendar planning and making sure that we’re all going to be in the same state at the same time.

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Is it easier when other band members are out doing other projects to work together with all the new technology that is available?

Yes and no. I mean, you can definitely send ideas back and forth much easier now than we could ten years ago or whatever. Myles had found the software online that would allow him to be in Spokane and us to be in Orlando and monitor in real time through all the software and interfaces and all this other stuff, where we could sort of jam together, like looking at each other on Skype. It was a big elaborate scheme that basically at the end of the day kind of fell flat on it’s face and we realized that there was just enough of a delay that it wasn’t going to work. I think the next day Myles booked a flight to come down here and do it in person. We tried the technology route and I think there’s a big potential for that in the future but the software just isn’t quite there yet.

Fortress is a great album. Out of the twelve songs that are on this CD, which one were you most excited about when you first heard it?

There was a few and a lot of those songs really evolved from the first day that we started working on them to actually going in and recording them. Like “Cry Of Achilles” is one, for example, that I was excited about when we first started doing it. Then once we got into pre-production, Elvis really had some radical ideas with arrangements and rhythms and that kind of stuff. Once we got the pre-production version of that down, I think we all were really, really excited to hear how that song was going to turn out in a recorded fashion. That was one that definitely exceeded our expectations. “Waters Rising,” hearing Mark, and you know he sang on all his solo record and it sounded awesome, but as of that song he had yet to do it in an Alter Bridge capacity.

There’s a bunch of them, you know. We really tried to think outside the box, arrangement-wise. Basically didn’t want to alienate our fans from Alter Bridge, what they were used to hearing, but we wanted to give them something different that they could really go, wow, this is innovative and new and not just us repeating ourselves over and over again. We wanted to try and push the boundaries of each of those songs and they all turned out great. There’s not one that I don’t like. There’re a lot of them, like I said, that really evolved from the first time we really heard them and started playing them to where they actually ended up. I’m amazed.

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What would you say was the “surprise” song, the one that almost didn’t make it onto the CD, or like you were talking about, might have started off one way but when you got in the studio and actually started putting it down, it was completely different?

There’s a few that ended up doing that. “All Ends Well” was a song that seems to be a fan favorite and was a song that really kind of got written sort of at the last minute and we weren’t sure if it was going to go on the record or not. I’m glad that we did that. “Calm The Fire” is another one. The song itself was pretty much arranged and done very early on in the process. We were really, really huge fans of it. The intro, Myles and Elvis just kind of concocted one night. The CD was almost done and it kind of blew us all away and just added so much to that song, with the mood that it’s put you in. “Fortress” was another one that sort of has this certain rhythmic pattern through most of the song and then once you get to the bridge, it changes into a different rhythm, a really kind of upbeat Queens Of The Stone Age-ish, Black Sabbathy sound. That was something that was last minute, that once we did it and then listened back to it, the whole song just took on a completely new image to us and quickly rose up the charts as one of our favorites.

Is there a song on the new CD that has been difficult to reproduce live?

You know, “Cry Of Achilles” was one that really goes to a bunch of different time signatures and there’s a lot of complex parts for all of us in that song and it’s one that we’ve rehearsed a lot. I felt like we really played it great the other night [in Orlando] but it’s one of those songs that if something goes wrong, it’ll be a monumental train wreck that will definitely bring the show to a screeching halt (laughs). That’s one you definitely think about ahead of time. There’s a couple other ones that there’s little intricate parts here and there and you just have to make sure you get it right so it can add a little pressure to it. But the more and more we play, they just start to feel like second nature and hopefully become easier and easier to play as the tour goes on.

alter5Where did you grow up and what were you like as a kid?

I grew up in a really small town in North Florida called Madison, Florida. It’s about sixty miles east of Tallahassee, right near the Florida/Georgia border. Both my parents were teachers. My mom was a middle school teacher who taught me at a different point or two through middle school. Then I moved to the high school thinking that I’ve got my freedom and I don’t have to be the teacher’s kid anymore and then she moves to the high school to teach English there as well (laughs) and I had her for several different classes there. My dad was a Junior College professor. He taught Microbiology and Anatomy and Physiology. I never had him as a teacher but I heard he was a good time, always liked to have fun with his students.

As far as me growing up, I was kind of an average kid. I enjoyed going out and playing a lot of football, riding BMX and skateboarding and all that other kind of stuff. Was always into music. Both my parents are very musical. My dad, his mom was a piano teacher who taught him how to play piano. I took piano lessons as a kid, kind of picked up his ability to sort of play by ear without having to read music, where you could hear music and pick out the parts to it. I played piano as a kid, I played saxophone all through middle school and high school, was in the marching band. I always wanted to play the drums but my parents were really against it for most of my childhood. Then finally, I think my Senior year in high school, I convinced them I was either going to play the drums or I’m just going to give up music altogether. And they finally caved in and let me march drums my Senior year.

From there it just took off. I could always kind of play, could sit down and sort of play a basic beat. I understood what parts of the drum set made what sounds and kind of learned a lot by watching MTV back when they played videos and actually showed rock bands on there and you could see the drummers, Tommy Lee doing the stick twirls and all of that other kind of stuff. Those were little things I picked up on and that was it. I think I always knew as early as I could remember that I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be in a band. That’s probably the reason I ended up going to Florida State. I majored in Business but I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to go and meet other guys that were musicians and try and start a band. Lo and behold, that’s kind of what happened.

Weren’t you in a jazz band when you were in school?

Yeah, I was, my freshman and sophomore year at the JuCo that my dad was a teacher at. I had really just started playing and my dad would play with a Jazz band pretty often and told me to come down and see if it was something I wanted to do. So for two years I played in the Jazz band but I definitely approached it more like a rock drummer than a Jazz drummer. I was pretty heavy handed with the drums but it was a lot of fun. A lot of old standard kind of Jazz tunes, nothing too fancy or crazy, but we’d get together a couple times a week and rehearse. Then we’d go out and perform. There was a time, a three or four day period where we went and traveled to different schools in our immediate areas, say a thirty or forty mile radius, so it kind of felt like we were gigging, you know, like a touring act. And that was the most fun I ever had and I just immediately knew this was what I want to do. It’s in my blood and something I definitely want to pursue.

What part of a drum set makes you nerd out?

(laughs) I don’t know, I have a pretty decent collection of snare drums. I think the only pieces that have a certain personality to them are probably the cymbals that you use and the snare drum. When you tune the toms up and the kick drum up and all that kind of stuff, they all kind of share a similar sound but snares have a real distinct personality. Over the years I’ve collected a bunch. It’s a lot different with guitar players, and Mark is the perfect example of this. Any gear that is out, some effects pedal or whatever he can get his hands on and kind of toy around with or mess around with, he’s all over it. He does it all the time. For drummers, you don’t really have that type of equipment. There’s not a lot of electronics in the drums so you might get a cool new cymbal stand that does something different but it’s not nearly as cool as some esoteric piece of gear that only a few guitar players in the world have. It’s not quite like that.

What was your most nerve-wracking experience on stage?

Probably the first one I can really remember is doing Woodstock in 1999, which was right before we had put out our second record as Creed. I think we had recorded most or all of it, but hadn’t released it yet. And going out in front of, I think, the biggest crowd we’d probably played in front of up to that time. Some radio festival shows might have had 15,000 or 20,000 people, which is a massive crowd but then all of a sudden you’re in front of a quarter of a million people, and seven or eight million that are watching on pay-per-view, and in the back of your mind you’re going, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this many people are watching me right now play drums.” That was definitely a little nerve-wracking and I had made the mistake of going out the night before and meeting a bunch of bands, some that were friends and some that I really idolized, and sort of enjoyed the adult beverages that evening, forgetting that I had to do a show the next day. So I was a little hung over and probably could have played a little better. But it turned out really cool. I think after the first couple of songs, the nervousness dies off and you just sort of roll with it.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

Man, that’s a good question. I think the first band that I ever went to go see and did whatever possible I could do to get a chance to meet them, I ended up paying one of the pit guys like $80 bucks or $40 bucks to get aftershow passes, which turns out you don’t have to pay for those. (laughs) But I went to go see Living Colour, and Candlebox was opening, and Candlebox had just come out. Living Colour at the time, and still to this day, is probably one of my favorite bands. Their drummer is one of the reasons I really started playing the drums. I basically was going to meet those guys. I’ve got a shirt I made myself that has all this Living Colour stuff on it and I’ve got to get it signed by them and sure enough I did. I got a brief chance to kind of chat with some of the guys. It was a pretty cool experience. They played this little club in Tallahassee and I got to meet the drummer from Candlebox before they had really kind of hit it off and we sat around and chatted for a little bit and that was a pretty cool experience as well. They’re not like the Mick Jaggers and Steven Tylers of the world or anything like that but that was the first chance I’d really had gotten to meet a national act that had videos on MTV and had songs that had done well and platinum records and that kind of stuff. So that was probably my first rock star meeting I guess you could say.

Do you still have the shirt?
I do somewhere. I’m not exactly sure where. It’s been quite a few years since I laid eyes on it but I know it’s in a box somewhere, probably in my attic or something. I’ll have to dig it out at some point.

This interview is going to run Halloween week. So what was the most awesome costume you ever wore when you dressed up for Halloween?

(laughs) Man, let’s see, there’s two different ones I can think of. It was probably in like 1999 or 2000 or something like that, and this was back when I lived in Tallahassee. I didn’t have a costume and all my buddies wanted to go as – you know that movie Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman? It was a Stanley Kubrick movie and they had sort of this secret society where they wore masks and capes and all this other stuff and they all wanted to go as that. And I thought it was a really lame idea and I ended up going to Wal-Mart at like 2:00 in the morning and they were completely out of costumes in adult sizes but they had kids costumes. I found this cheetah print like unitard zip up thing that had little cheetah ears on the hoodie. I managed to cut it up enough that I could actually fit into it and I wore like welding goggles and had the hoodie up and I wore the cape they gave me. So that was one outfit. I think actually that night I went to see Sevendust and Fuel play a show or something. I knew the guys and they looked at me like, “What in hell are you wearing?” (laughs) That was a good one. There’s some pictures floating around of me actually in that but I won’t point you in the right direction (laughs). You’ll have to find them on your own.

Then another year, I think it was 2004 maybe, right after the One Day Remains CD had come out and we were doing a show in Spokane, Washington. It was Halloween night and I couldn’t convince any of the guys in the band to dress up. So I got the runner at the venue, went to Wal-Mart at like 6:00 or 7:00 at night – we went on at like 9:00 – and again they had no adult sizes so I found a kids Captain America outfit that I had to cut into two pieces. So I really had like a half shirt on me, then these really weird looking capri pants or bottoms or whatever. But it came with the Captain America mask with the eyes cut out and had the wings that come off the side of it. I put that on underneath the clothes that I was wearing. I had on these breakaway Adidas pants and a shirt that I could get off pretty quick. So right before we did this song called “Metalingus,” which had this big drum intro, Myles introduced me and I sat up all the way and I yanked the pants off and then yanked the shirt off and then threw on the mask and started the song. It was pretty ridiculous looking but it got a good laugh out of the crowd (laughs)

You mentioned Sevendust. Are you going to do another Projected album with John Connolly?

We’ve been talking about it. We were definitely really proud of how it turned out. It sort of took on a life of it’s own. John had songs they weren’t going to use for Sevendust, stuff that he’d had for a while, and he wanted to get them recorded. I think initially it was going to be Vinnie and Morgan and himself doing it as just a little release it on his Facebook-type thing. Morgan ended up not being able to do it, and John and I were at a party together, we live pretty close to each other, and he was like, “What are you doing on such and such a date?” And I’m like, “Nothing. I’m here.” And he said, “You want to make a record?” “Sure, I guess, why not.”

So he gave me the demos and we went in and hadn’t ever played them together but just hit record and started jamming. Vinnie came down and started doing his bass tracks a few weeks after I got done. Then Erock, Eric Friedman, happened to be in the same studio working on some vocal stuff for Mark’s solo record, and Mark was in there as well, so we all kind of hung out. I think John asked Erock if he wanted to play some solos or something like that and it turned into him playing on probably about 60% or 70% of the record. Then all of a sudden, it went from John’s sort of solo thing to becoming a full-fledged band. Even though we’ve only done one show together up to this point, I think we’ll do a new record whenever we all find the opportunity to not be on the road or not working on a new Alter Bridge or Tremonti project record or a Sevendust record. But yeah, I think we’ll probably get something out within the next year or so.

What still excites you about playing music?

I think everything about it, you know. I love performing, I love playing the drums. I think that the camaraderie and friendship you gain from that with your bandmates and the other bands that travel with you. We’re fortunate enough to do this now for eighteen or sixteen years professionally and gotten to meet a lot of bands that we’ve looked up to, that we’ve become friends with, bands that might have looked up to us and eventually became friends with. I still just love music in general. I love being a part of it and around it. You still get that rush when you walk out on stage and I think that all four of us still have that. We still enjoy it.

What else do you want to do in your career?

I think with all of us, we always strive to get better at our instruments, to begin with. I have a bad habit of coming off a tour and not touching drums for months at a time. I think that can be healthy, where you’re able to sort of put it down and then come back to it later on and sort of try to gain a fresh perspective on the instrument. I think there’s always room for improvement. I think we all kind of pursue that and chase that. I think overall, longevity is probably one of the biggest goals that we all still have. To hopefully be able to do this for another decade or whatever it is, or longer; if it’s shorter, so be it.

I can see moving into the production side of things. I like the technical aspect of recording songs and I’ve tried to learn as much as I can from Elvis and his staff. I just think they’re the best at what they do of anybody we’ve ever worked with. And we’ve worked with some amazing producers. But I can see myself moving into that aspect of the music business. I’ll definitely never get on the label side or the management side or anything like that. The business side is definitely not the fun side of the music business. It’s a necessary evil but not one that I would want to pursue. I like creating music and making music and I think it’s something I’ll continue to pursue for a really long time.

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