“We like to keep the energy up on it, but we also like to have dynamics,” says Tremonti vocalist and guitarist Mark Tremonti, about the band’s second album, Cauterize.
 
Mark rose to prominence first with Creed, and then with Alter Bridge. Going into the Cauterize sessions, Mark wanted to record 20 songs, which he did; however only 10 appear on Cauterize. “Being a songwriter, I’ve got so many ideas that I’ve written over the years; I just want to make sure good ideas get used and don’t get wasted. So when I go into the studio, I make sure I put in a ton of work beforehand to organize stuff I’ve worked on so I can get as much out there as possible, and not sit on these ideas.”
 
Although Guns N’ Roses released a double album with Use Your Illusion, that wasn’t an option for Tremonti. “No, I think that’s just too many songs at one time. When somebody releases a 15-song record or more, I tend to lose focus. I don’t know if that’s just because I’m older now, as a kid I might have appreciated it. But now I just think… when I was growing up, Metallica – Master Of Puppets, had eight songs on it. To me, that was a great amount of songs to be able to digest. Any more than ten songs and you start to get lost; I didn’t want people to do that. If I were to release 20 songs, that would be overkill. So, we’re releasing the first record (Cauterize), and then we’ll wait to see when the time is right for the second record (Dust) to drop.” Metallica’s Ride The Lightning also consisted of eight songs, and it’s a classic. Now, people want everything and more, it’s somewhat depressing how greedy the world has become. “It’s over-saturation. I think that’s the problem with the world in general today. With the Internet and everything else, you have so much music out there that it’s hard to find great new stuff. Even though there’s so much to choose from, there’s still not a lot of super high quality stuff.”
 
Tremonti bassist Wolfgang Van Halen, who also plays with his father Eddie Van Halen in Van Halen, adds an extra layer of excitement to Cauterize. Although Wolfgang did not play on Tremonti’s debut, All I Was, he was part of the live band for the tour cycle. Now, Wolfgang has played on Cauterize, but unfortunately won’t be able to hit the road to support it live, due to previous commitments with VH. “Wolfgang joined forces with us on the very first tour we did. The more we played; he just became a member of the group along the way. When it came time to write the new album – me, Eric (Friedman, guitar), and Garrett (Whitlock, drums) got together for three or four days before Wolfgang came down. On the first album, we didn’t have a bass player to sit in the room with us and hear how these songs would sound all filled out with all the members playing; we were just kind of guessing. We tracked bass after the fact. But when you actually hear the bass going on and you have a bass player writing his bass lines as the process is going on, it becomes a more enriched record. His bass lines are perfect, and it makes the rhythm section sound so much tighter. You can’t really find a better bass player, a more technically proficient bass player than Wolfgang.”
 

 
All I Was, released in 2012, featured a tattoo-style cover; the artwork on Cauterize is strikingly different from its predecessor, yet both were created by Mark’s brother, Daniel Tremonti. “Of course, me and Dan will go back and forth with concepts and tweaking stuff. But I came across an image of this man coming out of the ocean, with the half head emerged in the ocean but it looked like it was some big giant creature. I sent Dan a few images along the lines of that, and we ran with it. Then we came up with the concept of this being some kind of science fiction creature that’s coming to storm the Earth and cauterize the impurities of the Human Race. The song ‘Cauterize’ itself is about absolute power and greed. So the science fiction creature coming out of the ocean is coming to burn the impurities out of mankind.”
 
Opening track, “Radical Change” is gripping because just ten seconds into the album, Mark sings, “Please just one more chance, I’ve just failed again.” Talk about an attention-grabbing lyric! “Well, ‘Radical Change’ is about… when I sat down and wrote the chorus to that song, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘it’s a radical change.’ I’d never said that phrase before in my life, but it struck me immediately and took me back to when Creed was falling apart and I had to grab all the courage in me to try and start over again. When you start over again, you realize just how hard it is. You don’t know where life’s going to take you, and you feel all the pressures of the world. The failure part is just constantly being… anybody in life – but this industry is tough. You constantly get beat down and get back up again. It’s kind of a similar theme to the song ‘Sympathy’ that’s later on in the record (track 9) where you’re constantly facing new challenges and sometimes it gets to be too much, but you keep on trying to fight through it.”
 
As a lyricist, Mark really wears his heart on his sleeve. “Yeah, I like to try and write lyrics sometimes though that can have multiple meanings. There’s certain songs, I think, that are better put out there as a very literal, straightforward meaning. But I like sometimes when songs can mean different things to different people.”
 
“Flying Monkeys” could potentially have multiple meanings as there’s a craft brewery in Barrie, ON called Flying Monkeys. “Oh wow, that’s awesome. I’ve got to look them up,” says Tremonti. And The Wizard Of Oz is also synonymous with Flying Monkeys. “That’s a funny story how that title came around. Back when I was on Alter Bridge tours, at sound check I’d get up there and play that riff, and the band would start playing along. Our drum tech, Tony Adams, would come out cause he loved it. He would say, ‘Man, that riff reminds me of The March Of The Flying Monkeys from The Wizard Of Oz.’ It’s funny cause my guitar tech at the time, Ernie Hudson, had some kind of weird fear of flying monkeys, so it became this funny thing. Our drum tech would buy a little stuffed animal flying monkey and throw it at Ernie. Whenever I would get on my computer and log my ideas, that riff would always be called ‘Flying Monkeys’. So when the song got finished, it couldn’t be called anything else but ‘Flying Monkeys’. It has no meaning lyrically to the song, but it couldn’t be called anything else.” That’s really unique to have a title that is so indifferent from the words of the song. “It’s like ‘Brains’ from our first album. That has nothing to do with the lyrics but I remember when I was writing the riff to that and recording it on my computer, my son was in the background and he was saying ‘Brains’. So that song became ‘Brains’.”
 

 
There has been serious civil unrest and disorder in The United States recently, given the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody in Baltimore, and on a somewhat different note the killings of three members of a prominent Washington D.C. family and their housekeeper. “Arm Yourself” would appear to be an innocent enough title, but even a brief moment of thought brings guns and ammunition to mind, specifically to protect you and your loved ones. “It’s funny you would bring up ‘Arm Yourself’, because the song that refers to what you’re talking about is ‘Tie The Noose’. ‘Arm Yourself’, for some reason when I was writing the melody of that, the title just kind of came out. And then I thought of this fictional character who was brought up in a family of… if it was modern day, the Grandpa and Dad were Marines, the brothers are enlisting in the Army, it was part of the lineage. This character in the song was supposed to be this warrior no matter what, he was born to not fear anything; but he’s definitely feeling the fear of living that lifestyle. It’s just about being brought up around this violent life of always putting your life at risk, having to end other people’s lives; but somebody who’s not really comfortable with it. But ‘Tie The Noose’ is exactly what you’re talking about. Every morning I get up, have breakfast and send the kids to school. Then I’ll turn on the news, and a lot of song ideas come from just seeing what’s going on in the world. Like you said, all the race riots and everything going on around the country. The problems with the police, day after day, inspired ‘Tie The Noose’. It’s sung from the perspective of somebody that’s just seeing red, going out and burning everything down. Just destroying things and thinking that’s the answer. Just hell-bent on causing as much destruction as possible to get some kind of justice… but of course that’s not the right answer. At the same time, you try and see things from both sides. You can see your younger self being put in a position like that and lashing out; it’s just a horrible situation in general.”
 
Watching television from a Canadian perspective, it almost seems that certain pockets of America are quickly becoming a crazier, scarier place to live. The way CNN paints it is God-Awful for lack of a better term. “Yeah, recently it’s not been great. We haven’t been affected by that so much travelling around on this tour, but bands going through Baltimore – even the (MLB team) Baltimore Orioles couldn’t have fans come into the stadium when they were playing their baseball game. It’s sad that it gets to that point. But it’s the way of the world man.”
 
Returning focus to Tremonti and his songs featured on Cauterize, “Dark Trip” is enthralling. In it, Mark sings, “It’s hard to say the wrong that I would do.” And he reveals the inspiration behind such a potent line. “That song is about welcoming somebody into your life and into your family, and having that person - for their own benefit - do something that would hurt you. It’s about betrayal. It’s about betrayal of trust and betrayal of somebody you showed love for that saw an opportunity and took it. When you hear the lyric, ‘What’s good for me is not so good for you,’ that sums it up. It was somebody I was very close to that took advantage of a situation and really dropped a bomb on me that I had to deal with for years. This is my way of venting about it. When you have a song like that, it’s tough to not sing about something that has some emotional backing to it, some kind of actual history.”
 

 
It would be remiss not to talk about Alter Bridge during our interview, so first and foremost, whatever happened to the CD/DVD/Blu-Ray release Live In Milan, that was scheduled to come out a year ago in June 2014, but never materialized? “It was kind of a misunderstanding between all the parties involved. To us, it was presented as Live In Europe, so it was supposed to be a big European collage of shows. Then it turned out to be just this show (Milan), and we weren’t happy with some of the performance; not every night can be top notch. It turned into a big nightmare.” Is it buried for good, or will it see the light of day at some point? “It might. It’s definitely something we’re talking about behind the scenes. There’s some things that legally we can’t really discuss.”
 
Apparently, Alter Bridge will reconvene and release a new album in 2016, is that accurate? “Yeah, me and Myles (Kennedy, vocalist) will try and get together at some point this year to start throwing ideas together.” Myles is currently on tour with Slash, dates are confirmed through mid-July with more to be announced; and word has come down that they’re already working on the follow-up to World On Fire. Furthermore, Tremonti will be playing shows in Europe throughout June. The likelihood of schedules allowing any time for Alter Bridge is doubtful. “It’ll only take me and Myles a week here and there to start getting the meat and potatoes of the song structures together,” responds Mark. “We work non-stop; we’ve already been writing separately. We’ll have a year’s worth of material to put into the next album, so it’s relatively quick when we get together to start piecing together the main outline of the record. But as far as touring on that record, that’s when we make sure we have ample time to really get out there. After the tracking of the next Alter Bridge record, I’ll go directly back out on tour to support the follow-up tour on the Dust album, and Myles will go back out and do a three-month Slash thing. Then it’ll be gung-ho Alter Bridge time when the album gets released.”
 
How will Dust compare to Cauterize? “They’re similar records. I want people to think of it as part one and part two of the same recording session. It’s not like it’s the second and third album. I just didn’t want to put out 20 songs at one time; I think that’s way too much for people to digest. If there were two slow songs, one got put on the first record and one got put on the second record. If there were ten heavy songs, five got put on the first record and five got put on the second record, and so on. They’re well-balanced records.”