Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash recently appeared as a guest on iHeartRadio and reflected on his long-term collaboration with Alter Bridge’s Myles Kennedy. The guitarist stated that he decided to call him in the first place after his Led Zeppelin audition.
As you probably know, Slash first teamed up with Myles Kennedy for his self-titled debut solo album. Kennedy contributed to both songwriting and singing of two tracks from the album, released in 2010. Later on, Slash released four more solo projects under the name of Slash featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators and Kennedy was the lead vocalist in all of them.
Besides the recordings, Myles Kennedy joined Slash also in his tours. The band’s fourth studio album, ‘4,’ was released on February 11, 2022. They have been currently continuing their US tour to support the new album. Kennedy was also at the top of the agenda with another topic before starting to work with Slash. There were some rumors that Led Zeppelin had offered him to join the band. Although Kennedy remained silent about the rumors in the first place, he then confirmed that he rehearsed and wrote with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham.
However, they didn’t release anything in the upcoming period, and the project was probably shelved. It looks like this audition process had a significant impact on Slash’s decision to call him. The guitarist explained that he couldn’t decide the singer while working on his solo record. At the time, Myles Kennedy was invited by Led Zeppelin to audition.
Then, Slash thought that Kennedy should be great to be called by Zeppelin, so he decided to offer him sing on his solo record. Slash added that he was immediately amazed by the demos Kennedy sent him, and thus, their long-term partnership started.
Here are Slash’s statements on working with Myles Kennedy:
“We started working together in 2010 when I did the solo record with all the singers you mentioned earlier. I’d never met him before, and I’d actually never heard him sing, but I’d heard a lot about him. When I was doing that record, I’d pretty much finished the record, but I had two songs left over that I never figured out who should sing. Myles Kennedy, at the time, had just been called up by Led Zeppelin to possibly do a tour with them.
I thought, ‘This guy really has to be good, I’m gonna call him.’ So I told him what I was doing and sent him some music, and he sent back the demos with vocals on them. They were f*cking amazing, so I asked him if he wanted to come down and record the album version of it, and he did. I thought, ‘I should take this guy on the road’ because he’s got kind of range that he can sort of cover my whole catalog, which was what I was going to do.”
You can listen to the entire conversation below.
