Rock Band Creed Calls It Quits After 8 Years
Fri Jun 4, 2004 08:53 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...ryID=5 350583
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rock band Creed, whose spiritually tinged music sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, has broken up after more than eight years as its members pursue new projects.
The Florida-based band, one of America's most successful rock acts in the post-grunge era of the late 1990s with such hits as "Higher" and "With Arms Wide Open," announced its dissolution in a message posted Friday on its official Web site.
Creed's songwriter-guitarist Mark Tremonti and drummer Scott Phillips will join the band's original bassist, Brian Marshall and former Mayfield Four member Myles Kennedy in a new band, Alter Bridge, which will release its debut album on Aug. 10, the group said.
"It's kind of sad to end a chapter of your life, but it's also exciting to be starting a new one," Tremonti said in the band's statement.
Co-songwriter and singer Scott Stapp will make his first post-Creed appearance with contributions to an upcoming collection of music inspired by Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," due out Aug. 31.
Both the Alter Bridge album and "The Passion" project will be released by Creed's Wind-up Records label. Stapp also is working with Canadian rockers The Tea Party on a future solo debut.
"Creed was one of the most amazing journeys through music and friends I am blessed to say I was a part of," Stapp said. "I made memories I could never replace.
Creed's last studio album, "Weathered," opened in December 2001 at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 pop chart and has sold more than 6.2 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Founded in 1995 in Tallahassee, Florida, by Stapp and Tremonti, who had been high school buddies, Creed formed its own label and recorded its first album, "My Own Prison," for a limited run in 1997. But a remixed version of the album subsequently released by Wind-Up Records, an imprint with distribution through Sony Music, scored a major success.
The reissued album yielded a string of No. 1 singles and paved the way for the band's blockbuster sophomore album, "Human Clay," which landed at the top of the charts in the fall of 1999 and sold 10 million copies over the next two years.
The album's first single, "Higher," spent a record-breaking 17 weeks as the most played song on rock radio, and "With Arms Wide Open" became the band's first No. 1 pop single and clinched a Grammy for best rock song.
Reuters/VNU