Interview met Myles Kennedy
Myles Kennedy : “Finding a balance is an ongoing mission in life”
Myles Kennedy is een bezige bij op vele fronten. Alter Bridge, met Slash en als soloartiest. In deze laatste hoedanigheid heeft hij zonet zijn derde soloalbum ‘The Art Of Letting Go’ uitgebracht en deze titel nodigde uit tot filosoferen. Het werd dan ook een heel mooi en diepgaand gesprek met de man die naast de drukte ook de waarde van mediteren en dankbaar zijn voor wat je bereikt hebt erg hoog in schat.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 26 november 2024
A new solo album! I remember that the previous one ‘The Ides Of March’ did a lot better than everybody expected in 2021. You could even do some gigs afterwards. Did the success give you extra pressure or did it encourage you to go on as solo artist?
Yeah I think to some degree it did. I mean, ‘’Ides Of March’ is one of my favourites in the catalogue, so at the end of the day I was really happy with that record. I was not quite sure what would be a proper way to follow it up, so I think that was part of the decision to turn the page and make a totally different record, just a straight hard rock record. So in some ways it was kind of deliberating on one side, once I gave myself the freedom to do that. We established our sound with ‘Ides Of March’ and that was fun, now we are just going to play the music that you are mostly known for in your career, which is hard rock and I think there is a difference in the lyrical content which did not have quite the gravity, neither ‘Ides Of March’ or ‘Year Of The Tiger’, you know. It were heavy records to write from a lyrical standpoint. This one is a little different dynamic, which was necessary for me to approach this time.
In which way is it different lyrically?
First and foremost it is not a concept album. The first two records each had a storyline essentially. With ‘Year Of The Tiger’ it was losing my father and the dynamic that had with my family and the second record was just looking at the state of the world, with all the craziness that we are all going through and trying to figure out how to navigate that and work through that, while this record is just each song is a snapshot from a different emotion, or a different story in my life, from a different album I am trying to work through, so that was really nice. It allowed me to kind of stretch out, depending on the mood of the day as I had to stay on this storyline of twelve songs straight.
When we see the title, I immediately think about the subject of letting things go. That is a question everybody asks to him or herself from time to time…
‘The Art Of Letting Go’, for me it is just trying to evolve as a person. For three years I just tried to navigate my emotions and my own desires and I think once I stumbled upon this concept of the art of letting go, it is just automatically about not being reactive and not being too attached to things and living in a more mindful state. It proved really to be very effective for me, not just in my personal development, but also creatively. It kind of liberated and freed me up on my own way and I wish I had stumbled upon that up for a long time ago, but I am grateful that I finally found it.
So you had to work on it… because that was one of my main questions: are you a person who can easily let things go?
No! I certainly can more than if you’d ask me that question ten years ago. I am doing much better with it now, but I still have this tendency of worrying about many things. Now I am just learning this art of letting go actually. I have a little brain axe to navigate me and shut that down to have not the power that used to hang over me, but it is an ongoing daily effort, you know. Every day I wake up and the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, I take my iphone and meditate for fifteen minutes, just to kind of set the tone for the day. When I come to a situation where I can be reactive or something, like thoughts that I cannot stop ruminating on, I can integrate this new set of tools to deal with it. It helps me so much. It has just been so wonderful to discover.
That is an idea! Starting the day every day with the question what you will do in this world today to make it better, to make myself better and so on…
It is funny, because it just sets the tone for the day for me and I found out, when I don’t do it, sometimes I get into trouble that day. I was thinking: ‘what did I do differently?’ oh shit, I did not start my day the way I want to start it, with some mindfulness. It is interesting, because what you do discover has this kind of effect on the people that are around you as well, in a good way. It brings a certain level of calm equability that might not have existed otherwise. It doesn’t always work, but certainly many times you can feel it and it is like ‘ah I can operate on this wavelength, this is okay’.
It reminds me a bit of when I was younger, I always made a list for the next day, all the things I wanted to do…
That is a great idea! It is wonderful, I should do that myself.
The song ‘Nothing More To Gain’ should deal with targets, always bigger, always more, while happiness can be found in small things…
Yes you can. I totally feel that way. I feel like just stepping back and realizing that at this moment there is eccentric freedom and you don’t need to be doing something or requiring something or getting a dopamine rush of some sort. You can truly, if you really step back and take a breath and realize what you have at this very moment, that can be really powerful, a wonderful reminder. For me… actually a fan said this to me, she is wonderful. She said ‘gratitude is the attitude’ and I thought ‘oh I love that!’ The idea of being grateful of what you have right now. So yeah once again this all kinds of fall in line with this art of letting go and this idea of just being here now.
‘Miss You When You Are Gone’ is a very nice and sensitive song. It deals with accepting the transitory nature of life. That means that nothing stays the same actually….
Yeah, it is the eternal permanence of all things must pass and it is something that is easier said than done. With saying a phrase like that, you think: ‘okay, all things must pass, it is the transitory of life’; but the way that it actually happens, it is hard. Us humans get attached to situations, we get attached to people and you want them to be around forever, but that is just not the way it works. For me, I needed to write a song addressing that to go through it.
When you say ‘all things must pass’, it is a little bit sad I think…
Sure. The bad things pass but also the good things pass. Yesterday me and my wife were walking with the dog. We love him so bad, his name is Monster. He is nine years old now and I was like: ‘man, it just reminded me that he is a morbid dog. How much time do we have with this awesome dog? But at the same time it makes me appreciate the given moments I have with him. I don’t take that for granted. It makes it special. I was looking in a way like when I was really young when dating for the first time. We still had black and white TV’s, old ones that people used to have and I always thought: ‘what would it be like when people have coloured television, seeing all these vibrant colours’? And that is how I am kind of looking at life. When you take things for granted and you don’t realize what you have got until it is gone versus when you become mindful and you become appreciating and graceful and suddenly you see everything in colour. I think it makes it more vibrant and makes life much more special.
In ‘Behind The Veil’ you sing ‘silence takes its toll’. Was that more or less inspired by the pandemic when sometimes it was hard to deal with it?
That line came to me in a dressing room and I was on the road for a while with Slash last year and I was missing my dog and my wife and my friends, because I am on the road a lot. I am more on the road than home and I spent my life this way for decades. It is all I have known, but it is that silence that you have sitting by yourself so much of the time. It is eventually kind of taking its toll. There is another line: ‘there is a long never ending road, let’s pretend it is our home’. The long never ending road is my home to a point, because of how much I tour and making music, but it is not quite the same and it is pretending to be my home and I am pretending that it is my home. There are different ways of looking at this. You could say ‘home is wherever you are’ now that we are talking about the philosophy behind the art of letting go and that is a very good point. And there is that other side of me where I am still longing, I am still yearning. I have to integrate all these philosophies to where it is automatic. That moment, when I wrote that lyric, I was definitely missing my home and my family.
On the other hand, the road has an attractive nature, the road has something adventurous…
It does, yeah, especially when you get to go out and playing music that you have written and you go to all these places all over the world and you come together under this common cause, which is your music or music in general. That is the lure, that is why I leave home for most of the time. It is because that rush. It is hard to recreate anywhere else. That’s why I do it and we don’t take it for granted. Hopefully people keep on liking us, because it is a luxury to be able to communicate this way. I am lucky to get to do it.
I am glad that you still think this way. As long as an artist thinks this way, I think he is doing it from the heart…
Yeah… it is funny, because people get burnt out and then they got jaded and they forget what they’ve got, but for me I think it is really crucial to live – as I said earlier – with ‘gratitude is the attitude’.
‘How The Story Ends’ happens to be inspired by the movie ‘Speak No Evil’. Can you tell something about that, since I did not watch that movie?
Yeah I saw the original and it is funny, I am actually going to see a remake of it they did in the US. I am actually going to see it tonight. I am really excited. The original I saw, dubbing the subtitles and it really spoke to me. It is really dark. It is definitely disturbing and scary. I am not in to those movies normally, but my wife she wanted to watch it. When we finished the movie and I really figured out what the moral of the story was, it really resonated with me. That is the idea: not bring yourself in situations where you – also in just not speaking up for yourself – and you are lying to yourself and walked all over and that is one of my big flaws. I always had that, pleasing people to the fold. There is nothing wrong with making people happy, but not to the death of yourself, you know. And that movie really did a great job in conveying that issue. It was fun to get to write a song based around that.
It is embedded in our education: you have to please everybody: your boss, high degrees at school, be a nice student. You always have to please someone else in your life so it seems…
Good point. It is very true. You learn that and once you go through life you have to get rid of it. It is good always thinking about the people and be curious and aware of the people’s needs, but just don’t get to the point where you sign yourself short. Finding a balance is an ongoing mission in life.
‘Saving Face’ also resonates to me, because I am a bit older. It deals with the fact that a new generation is coming up with different visions and how are you going to stand in that world with all your knowledge and experience…so it is a kind of contrast…
You just said it perfectly. In fact of all the interviews I have done, you touched on it magnificently. That is essentially, it summarizes my feeling with that song. I am getting older myself and realizing that relevance is fleeting, especially in my business. I am a massive fan of Ella Fitzgerald and she has a song that she covers… my favourite record that she did is when she covers George Gershwin, the Gershwin classic records and the song called ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’. At the beginning of that song she has like a little narrative that she does and she basically talks about how time erase your name and that really resonated with me. It made me realize just how – especially as entertainers we have a shallow life. I was asking myself; ‘how are you going to deal with that?’ when you are the old guard and the way of thinking about things or being creative might be not as wealthy as it used to be. How will you navigate in those waters? And it is a very fascinating dynamic for me as I try to move forward. I feel like I have been really lucky in the stage of still enough people and young people who are discovering it and it extended my career a lot longer than I ever would have imagined, but I am certainly aware of it. I don’t take it for granted. There is a whole generation nipping at my heels and that is beautiful, that’s the way it should be, you want new blood coming into equation, that is part of how things progress.
It is a bit of a comfort when you see all artists around you are aging too. Take The Rolling Stones as example. They are so old and yet so many people still go to a concert of that band…
I totally agree. To me they are already the pinnacle in that sense, because the fact that they are all around 80, and they are still doing it. It is blowing my mind. I am actually halfway through Keith Richard’s autobiography right now and it is fun to read that, knowing that he is around 1970 in the book and it is funny like someone would have told him at that point in his life that he was still going to be doing it fifty or forty years later. It is blowing my mind but it is very inspiring to see them out still doing it and it makes you realize that there is a future. They always say that you have to be retired when you are fifty when you do this, which is beautiful.
We are the first rock-‘n-roll generation that experience seeing rock stars getting old…
Yeah, it is always funny to see Pete Townsend singing ‘hope I die before I get old’ you know…
Or The Beatles ‘When I’m 64’…
(laughs) Right, which is crazy because I think Paul McCartney is somewhere in his eighties as well. 64 is young, if he looks at it now… He will think ‘I wish I was still 64’.
Can we hope for concerts in Europe with the new record?
Yeah, the touring will start in October and we will be rehearsing here in the next week or so. I am excited to get back over there. I can’t wait. I mean, Europe and the UK have been such an important part of the journey for the bands I’ve been involved with and I am very aware of how lucky we are. See, that seems to be the theme of this conversation, just how lucky I am (chuckles).
When you will perform in Europe, it will be a mix of old and new material I guess? So we can expect a lot of diversity I think…
Yes, The nice thing is that we have three records to choose from now and that’s going to be great. I am excited to play a lot of the new material, but we are going to be careful there. We will not play too much new material, because we want to give people time to spend with the new record instead of doing this thing overhead. It is a delicate balance, but we are going to bring songs of my old catalogue, the drummer and I were in The Mayfield Four, so some songs from them are possible. We might be doing an acoustic Alter Bridge thing or something but overall we are going to focus on the body of the solo work.
You are going to play live as a trio?
We are just going to play as a three piece. So obviously all of the guitar stuff and vocals and my band will be the same Zia Udin on drums and Tim Tournier on bass. We go out as a power trio.
What are the plans with Alter Bridge?
We are just trying to figure out schedules. Everybody’s got their various projects going and we are going to try and figure out something for next year to find a date.
And the program with Slash, what is there going on?
Kind of the same thing, just trying to figure out when we can go to the studio next. The beauty of having three different bands is the plan. You can always create and tour and have fun, but part of the problem is that it must be a nightmare for booking agencies and some managers, because our schedules are so busy, but we always seem to make it work. It is a kind of miracle really.
And that you have so much inspiration to give three bands a descent existence! How do you manage to do that?
(laughs) Well, for me I am always most surprised when we finish another record. I think then: ‘And we have to go through another one…’ thank goodness the well won’t dry out I think for all of us, as long as we can still create and songs coming, we will be doing it.
