"Ten million on the last record is hard to beat," says Mark Tremonti, Creed’s 27-year-old guitarist and main musical architect. The self-evidence of this declaration is not lost on him. He knows that 1999’s Human Clay–with its dynamic radio-ready duo of "Higher" and "With Arms Wide Open"–shot the Florida band through the ionosphere with sales figures that few bands could hope to match. He also knows it’s no cinch that he can do it again.

"We always want to outdo ourselves," Tremonti says. "We always want to overcome any hurdles that we’re faced with. We work well under pressure and we’re never satisfied. As much as ever, we’re determined to work hard to make this record work as well as the second [record] and the first record worked."

It’s the day after Weathered, the anxiously awaited follow-up to Human Clay, has been mastered, so it’s easy to forgive Tremonti this bit of premature exuberance. Of course, it took Creed (briefly known as Naked Toddler after coming together in the summer of 1995) barely five years to go from playing for 50 people at a family restaurant to selling a million concert tickets in a single year. Perhaps Tremonti isn’t being premature at all.

Creed finished up its strenuous 16-month tour for Human Clay just before Christmas 2000. At the time, singer and wordsmith Scott Stapp, now 28, said he was looking forward to reflecting on everything. The group had sold a total of 16 million albums domestically in three-and-a-half years, with most of that time spent in cities around the U.S. The plan was for the bandmates to take some time off, clear their heads, and get reacquainted with loved ones before reconvening early this year to write. (Stapp has a 3-year-old son, Jagger; 28-year-old drummer Scott Phillips is married; while Tremonti has a girlfriend.)

As they had done with both Human Clay and their 1997 debut My Own Prison, Creed and producer John Kurzweg rented a tract house in suburbia to record Weathered. "We tried to find a house on a lake," Tremonti says, "but all the houses on a lake had some kind of ordinance where you weren’t allowed to have studio equipment or musical equipment. So we just got a house out in the ’docks somewhere, in a little community about 25 minutes from where we live." (They’ve all moved from Tallahassee to Orlando, with Tremonti and Stapp on opposite ends of the same block.)