Creed To Play All Of ‘Human Clay’ Album At Mohegan Sun

Nostalgia is catching up with us as musicians resurrect albums on stage that we’ve scarcely had time to forget about: Rapper 50 Cent last month performed all of his 2003 effort “Get Rich or Die Tryin'” at a festival in Texas, and ’90s hard-rock band Creed hit the road the spring to play all of its 1999 release “Human Clay.”

Why?

Popular demand, in Creed’s case.

“It came as a mixture of our fans’ input, our management and, once we started thinking about it, especially heading into writing some new music, we started to see it as, maybe we can get a little push from our fans to get back to the roots, and we’ll see how that effects us moving forward in terms of new music,” Creed singer Scott Stapp says by phone from Florida, where the band is rehearsing for a tour that stops Saturday at Mohegan Sun.

It also makes sense from a business standpoint. “Human Clay,” which yielded the No.1 singles “Higher” and “With Arms Wide Open,” has sold nearly 12 million copies in the U.S., good for a diamond certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. By contrast, the band’s 2009 album, “Full Circle,” has only moved 400,000 units, which falls shy of gold-record status.

Creed recorded the latter album when the quartet reunited after a five-year breakup in the mid-2000s, which included talk from the musicians talked about how their creative relationship had become too strained to carry on. (There was also the infamous class-action lawsuit some disappointed fans filed against the band after a incoherent performance in Illinois in 2002. The suit was dismissed.)

Things have changed since then, Stapp says.

“All of us are a lot more mature and have different priorities in life,” he says. “From my standpoint, it was just time to bury that. Over the years, we were like brothers, a family, and at some point in time, even with your family and friends, you forgive and move on, just put it behind you.”

During the breakup, Stapp released a solo album, 2005’s “The Great Divide”; and the other members of Creed — guitarist Mark Tremonti, bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips — formed Alter Bridge with singer Myles Kennedy. Alter Bridge released three albums, none of which came close to matching Creed’s success.

That success made a reunion inevitable, and not only for financial reasons. Stapp says he and Tremonti have recaptured the creative energy that made their earlier work so huge.

“We have a unique chemistry in my opinion,” Stapp says. “He and I have a mutual inspiration society going on where what I do inspires him and what he does inspires me. I know where he’s going before he goes there, and he knows where I’m going before I go there.”

That sort of interplay is the result of years of playing together, which began when Stapp and Tremonti, who knew each other in high school classmates, became friends while they were students at Florida State University.

“We’d get together with our friends or drop by a party with our acoustic gutiars, and we’d literally write songs in front of people on the fly, building our chops, getting experience, and that four or five years of experience doing that refined an already amazing writing relationship,” Stapp says. “It’s taken 10,000 hours or more.”

Creed is kicking around ideas for new songs, though Stapp says nothing definitive will happen until after the band wraps up the current tour.

“We’ve got about four or five that we want to continue working on and let them grow, and we’ve got this tour here, and we’ll see what comes from it,” he says.

Creed performs with Eve to Adam Saturday, April 21, at Mohegan Sun, 1 Mohegan Sun Blvd., Uncasville. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $35 via www.ticketmaster.com. Information: 860-862-7163 or www.mohegansun.com/entertainment.