Haunted By Design – Myles Kennedy

Myles deserves a little more credit for his own music after the Slash and Co post yesterday. There’s a lot of love online for his work, for his voice, for his turning up and playing the show around the time you expected him to do so and it has to be said for the confessional and raw solo record he put out right at the start of the year.

Year Of The Tiger the album is Myles taking the trauma of losing his father and making music from it. It’s a record that sees the man laying himself open and he exposes his fears, his feelings and his doubts in song with acoustic accompaniment. There’s little in the way of his usual bombastic rock on the album.

This guy is usually surrounded by the full tilt metal mechanics of Alter Bridge. His powerful voice soaring above Mark Termonti’s guitar lines in heavy numbers and on their power ballads. This is different. Myles isn’t showing off his range and reaching for a brass ring while throwing rock shapes on Year Of The Tiger. As Haunted By Design demonstrates, this is music as a balm. He’s looking for catharsis. This is music as therapy. It’s the blues. It’s heartfelt and it’s powerful.

Myles Kennedy cuts the somewhat cartoonish silhouette of a rock star most of the time. Here he’s taken things down a notch and is contemplating what motivates, what inspires and why he does the things he does. This might be Myles Kennedy’s Nebraska, his After The Gold Rush. There’s more Alter Bridge on the way (they’ve released a live album since Year Of The Tiger came out back in March) and he’s just about to head out with Slash (and & and) so the Solo Album chapter has a line under it already but who knows what else he’s got to share under his own name in the future.

I for one will be listening during the silences to hear what else he has to say.