Myles Kennedy Eyes 2018 for Long-Awaited Solo Album ‘Year of the Tiger’
For the past few years, Myles Kennedy has alternated between fronting Slash's band and his long-standing gig with Alter Bridge. The singer has frequently discussed working on a solo album and it looks like the disc will arrive in 2018.
The album is called Year of the Tiger, and during a chat with Metal Wani (seen above), Kennedy discussed his upcoming solo effort, calling it "probably the closest thing to a full-on concept record I've ever written."
He went on to explain, "The story is congruent throughout the entire ... It basically tells a story from start to finish, and it documents when my father passed away when I was a kid and basically what happened after that with my mom, my brother and I — it tells that story, so it's a full-on concept from start to finish."
Kennedy worked on the album with producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette and he says in the interview that he actually mixed a first take of the effort back in 2016. As for the decision to hold off on releasing it, the singer says, "I was very busy playing with Alter Bridge and touring with that, but in my spare time, I was chipping away at this record, so when I actually documented it and finished it, I had to step back and look at it with a fresh perspective and say, 'You know what? You've gotta be honest with yourself as a writer. Is this where you are now? No. And is this what you want to represent where you are now? No.' That was a hard decision for me to make, because there was a lot of work that went into it. Not just work, but time and money, and I just felt like, regardless of that, I had to scrap and start over. So I started writing again late last year, early this year, and, fortunately, I had plenty of ideas to draw from." While most of Year of the Tiger is new, Kennedy did hold over one track, re-recording the song and building off its original demo.
As for what fans can expect musically, the singer states, "Year of the Tiger definitely has much more of a blues-based vibe ... the instrumentation is certainly somewhat of a departure. I tried to veer away from any sort of high-gain wall of sound. There's plenty of resonator guitar, mandolin… there's even banjo, a lot of lap steel. So it's definitely different from what I've done."
Alter Bridge are finishing out the year touring and expect to be off the road for a majority of 2018 to allow for other projects, including Kennedy's solo effort, to get some time. As for Kennedy's gig with Slash, the guitarist has continued to be busy with his reunion with Guns N' Roses. So look for Myles Kennedy's Year of the Tiger coming in 2018, and by the looks of a recent Facebook post, the first video may already be in the works.
See Alter Bridge's The Last Hero in the 20 Best Rock Albums of 2016
Alter Bridge's Myles Kennedy + Mark Tremonti Guest on the Loudwire Podcast