SIGN OF THE TIMES

You can set your watch by Mark Tremonti. For three decades the guitarist has run his career like a military campaign. There’s the album and tour cycle, as regular as clockwork. The precise guitar solos, never a note missed. And, sure enough, here he is on Zoom at eighteen hundred hours, black-clad and as close cropped as a Navy Seal (if a little longer and greyer of beard). “My kids have made fun of me for cutting my own hair over lockdown,” the 47-year-old sighs. “I think I’d be a lot cooler to them if I was a basketball player.”

While Tremonti has been a steady presence through the biblical bluster of Creed in the 90s, the arena-filling ascent of Alter Bridge in the noughties and the first four entries in his solo career since 2011, this year’s , he remembers, marked his first professional wobble. “I had a little period, maybe five months deep into the pandemic, where things weren’t turning around and just kept on getting worse. I lost my drive – to get to the studio,