The stop of all live concerts last year also affected the guitarist and songwriter of the US band Alter Bridge. Like many of his colleagues, however, he knew how to use it creatively. After "Walk The Sky" was released, a tour was actually scheduled. "But it had to be cancelled because of the pandemic. For a few months we were slowed down. It was a good time to work on a new Tremonti album." So bandmate Eric Friedman flew from the West Coast to join him in Florida to work together on demos for studio album No. 5.
"Usually we have about three weeks to do this. This time it was three months. We were able to prepare everything down to the last detail for the studio." Ideas with autobiographical features were also used, which Mark Tremonti had already been carrying around for a while: "Would You Kill", for example, revolves around the question of how far someone would go who wants to achieve something specific at any cost. Would he kill for it, too? The whole thing is written from the point of view of someone who is not exactly on the sunny side of life and has to deal with people who were already born with a silver spoon in their mouth. "Sprang from my own experiences. When I was younger, I worked two crappy jobs, around the clock, and still barely had any money, while also attending school and watching rich kids get practically everything."
Also very personal is the title track, which can be taken as a call to be an upstanding, confident person in a world full of lies. "'Marching In Time' is my story. My wife told me last year that she was pregnant. That was beautiful on one hand, and my daughter is the best thing in the world that could have happened to me. But to experience something like that in times of pandemic wasn't easy, especially when you make your living writing songs. My songs are meant to be encouraging, even in such hard times, to be honest but free from all the negativity you find out there in the world. I wish people would talk to each other instead of fighting. I wanted to get all of that across with the song."
