The second solo album for former Creed frontman Scott Stapp is personal, as it handles topics such as drug addiction, religion, and thoughts of suicide. "Proof of Life" came out Tuesday and follows the theme of Stapp's 2012 autobiography, "Sinner's Creed."
"The seeds were planted in 2007," Stapp, 40, told United Press International. "I just had a lot to go through and to get through in order for it to be born. I'm glad it's finally here. It's a huge sense of accomplishment and I feel like almost a weight has been lifted that it's finished."
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Before Creed's breakup in 2004, the group had 11 No. 1 hits and had sold more than 60 million albums. When that stopped, Stapp said he experienced a range of emotions and options that included suicide, according to his autobiography. He related that his faith in God helped him, and led to him sharing his feelings in his book and album.
"It definitely wasn't easy to get to this point," his autobiography says, according to The Inquisitr. "To get through the book, to get through this record, to get sober and clean, to bring healing and repair the chaos and the hurt and the pain that not only I experienced, but that alcoholism and addiction can bring to those that you love. It holds them hostage in the torment that it can bring to their lives, and through all the destruction that follows."
The lead single on his new album, "Slow Suicide" depicts just that.
"It's a direct characterization of what I felt for a time in my life -- what I was doing to myself with what I was putting in my body, getting caught up in that lifestyle and that lifestyle becoming a disease, and
it was slowly killing me," Stapp said, according to CBS News.
"Proof of Life" comes out eight years after his debut solo album, 2005's "The Great Divide." Stapp feels the two works are not alike.
"It's different on so many levels," Stapp told UPI. "Content-wise it's from a much different place from me as a human being — much more of a reflective place, a place of maturity and honest commentary on myself and my situations that started with that record in 2005. I think in 2005 with 'The Great Divide' I still had a lot of emotions in terms of anger and bitterness over some things that had gone on. And also I was in a much darker place of desperation. That was really the beginning of the story. It took nearly seven years to bring reconciliation to that and to grow and change as an artist and as a human being and for this record to be born."
Creed was founded by high school classmates Stapp and Mark Tremonti in 1993. Their song "With Arms Wide Open" won a 2001 Grammy for Best Rock Song.
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