It took only $6,000 for Creed [ tickets ] to produce 1997's "My Own Prison," which went quadruple-platinum and was the first debut ever to have four No. 1 rock radio singles. It cost "a little bit more" to record the multi-platinum "Human Clay" in the spring of '99, but none of this seems to faze 27 year-old drummer Scott Phillips.

The laid-back Madison, Fla., native met frontman Scott Stapp and guitarist Mark Tremonti in Tallahassee in 1994, after teaching himself to play the drums by mimicking the styles of Rush's Neil Peart and Living Colour's Will Calhoun. Aptly, he propels Creed's blend of hard rock and spiritual lyrics with equal parts power and finesse.

LiveDaily correspondent Don Zulaica recently spoke with Phillips as Creed toured in support of "Human Clay."

LiveDaily: Where did you guys record "Clay?"

Phillips: We recorded the album here in Tallahassee. Right now, I'm the only one that's left livin' here. Everybody else has moved down to Orlando for various reasons.

How long did the process take?

We started in probably late April of '99. And we had gone in and finished recording and mixing everything probably about mid-June or even the beginning of July. We rented a house, and had the same producer that did "My Own Prison," John Kurzweg. It was just an empty house that had 12-14 foot ceilings, wood floors, a real big room. Had a good sound to it. We set up shop in there and just hunkered down for about two or three months.

Did you go into the recording with music already written, or was some of it done there?

Actually most of it was written when we were touring "My Own Prison." Even some of the stuff was written before we'd even gotten signed. We had done "My Own Prison" the middle of '96 until the beginning of '97, released it locally around March of '97 and got a deal the summer of '97. But there was a song or two that was written before we had even gotten a deal with Wind-Up. So it was just an ongoing process.

I don't know, I think for everybody it was the best way to do it and the easiest way to do it ... rather than run into a studio and say, "You've got three weeks, write ten or fifteen songs and record 'em." It was just a gradual process.

After "Prison's" success, was there a lot of pressure to repeat?

There wasn't, really. A lot of times, when you're going in to do a second album [and] your first album did well ... there's a lot of pressure to try to top that. Well, most of these songs were written before we'd even had success. So there wasn't any pressure of, "We've got to top this." It was just: "Let's write songs that are better than the first album, without thinking of what the public is going to feel about it."

How did you get introduced to music?

At a really young age. It was probably the introduction of MTV that corrupted my life back in '81-'82 or whenever it started, maybe even before then. My dad played trumpet and always listened to jazz albums. Mom played piano and a little bit of guitar. My grandmother was probably the one that passed the musical gene down, she taught piano her whole life and just had a real good sense for music. She could play by ear, all that stuff. Passed it on to my dad, and I guess kind of passed it on to me. And I got a bug for it at an early age.

I think I was looking through the Sears catalog and went, "Hey, a drum set. That's cool." And they were like, "Yeah, you can get that stuff, but you've got to learn how to read music and play piano first." So I took piano lessons--this was when I was seven or eight.

How long did that last?

I did that for probably three or four years. It was a grin-and-bear-it kind of thing. And from there it was my sixth grade year, which was when we could start playing in band, and I was like, "All right, I'm going to be a drummer." They were: "Nope, can't play drums. You've got to play a musical instrument." So I picked saxophone and played that for a while.

But I always loved the drums. That was the one thing I was drawn to--if I ever saw a band, I was focused on the drummer. When we were in marching band, I focused on the drum section. It just felt natural, that was the instrument of all of them that I was really drawn to.

Was there a favorite drummer you had in your formative years, somebody that really nailed you?

When I was in junior college [in the early 90s], probably one of the biggest influences was Will Calhoun from Living Colour. That was one of my absolute favorite bands. My grades were always okay in high school, I was a B and a C student, and I was in a lot of honors classes and could make As in them, but I never, ever applied myself--probably the biggest underachiever there ever was. And my parents weren't very strict at all, but they would set aside an hour or two a night that I needed to study. Well, I would always take in headphones and a Walkman and listen to the Living Colour tapes over and over again and never did any homework whatsoever. But I guess in a way that was my homework, because I was always studying what he was doing on drums. That was probably the biggest influence on me that really got me into wanting to be a drummer seriously.