Comparisons tend to be inevitable in rock music, so here’s Scott Stapp‘s response to being called an “Eddie Vedder rip-off” back in the day.
When Creed and a lot of other rock bands became popular in the late ’90s, they were often accused of riding the coattails of the Seattle grunge bands that ruled the genre a few years prior. Dubbed “post-grunge,” many of these groups were inspired by Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, but created songs that were slightly more universal in sound.
Stapp, in particular, was criticized at times for having a similar vocal style to Vedder.
“I doubt I’m the only one who heard Creed’s My Own Prison on the radio and thought, ‘Cool, a new Pearl Jam song.’ I was surprised to find out that the Eddie Vedder voice belonged to Scott Stapp of the Tallahassee rock band, Creed,” a 1997 Sun Sentinel review of My Own Prison read, though the rest of the article was much more complimentary than some other publications were.
“Hey, they said the same thing about Darius Rucker. He was the Eddie Vedder rip-off before they called me the Eddie Vedder rip-off. I felt like I was in good company, and I was honored by the compliment,” Stapp assured in a new interview with Guitar World.
Guitarist Mark Tremonti acknowledged that they were fans of the grunge bands that reigned earlier in the decade, but asserted that they weren’t trying to emulate them.
“When we came out with My Own Prison, it was the moodiest song on the radio. I think that kind of set us apart,” he said. “We were fans of a lot of the grunge bands, but I don’t think we ever tried to fall in line with them. We were just doing our own thing.”
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Tremonti denied that the heavier nature of their 1999 album Human Clay had anything to do with the criticism they received for sounding like their grunge predecessors. Instead, he described it as a result of all of the pressure they received from their label and the media to avoid a sophomore slump.
“When Human Clay came out, that was a band trying to fight and survive,” he recalled, with Stapp adding that the record spawned four No. 1 songs, including “With Arms Wide Open” and the ever-popular “Higher.”
