Former Creed star Scott Stapp's new single is an ode to his tragic peers Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington.
The rocker admits he had a tough time following the 2017 suicides of the Soundgarden and Linkin Park frontmen and decided to turn his thoughts into song lyrics.
The result is Gone Too Soon, which also takes on the accidental overdose rate among U.S. veterans.
"Somewhere around the time Chester passed, and we had already been reeling from Cornell's passing, I was flipping through the news and saw the suicide rate for (U.S. military) vets was skyrocketing, and all these people are OD-ing (overdosing) from heroin, drug addictions, opioids..." he tells Billboard. "It was just a collection of things that all hit me at once.
"So it (song) was inspired by a series of events that just came together to impact me as a human being, all at once."
Scott has firm links to the military - his With Arms Wide Open Foundation focuses largely on military members and their families dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Gone Too Soon will feature on Stapp's first album in six years, The Space Between the Shadows, which was released on 19 July (19).
The deaths of Chester and Chris were on many fans' minds over the weekend (20-21Jul19) - Saturday marked what would have been Cornell's 55th birthday and the second anniversary of Bennington's death. Family, friends and bandmates paid tribute to the pair on social media.
