IN: Kennedy was born as Myles Richard Bass on November 27, 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, and subsequently lived in Northern Idaho. As a child, he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he grew up in a Christian Science family on a farm. His father, Richard Bass, died when he was four years old and his mother subsequently went on to marry a Methodist minister, and the family took the surname Kennedy. Before Kennedy attended Mead High School (which he attended with football player Jason Hanson), he found musical inspiration from Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and John Sykes' Blue Murder band.

Kennedy is best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the American hard rock band Alter Bridge. The band's origins lie in late 2003 when Kennedy was contacted by former Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti, who was interested in having Kennedy lay down vocal tracks for some songs he had recently written. Tremonti and drummer Scott Phillips had reunited with former bassist Brian Marshall who had left Creed in 2000 to form a new band. Alter Bridge, taking its name from an actual bridge that used to be located near Tremonti's home in Detroit, was officially formed in January 2004. Coinciding with the official announcement of Alter Bridge's formation was an announcement regarding their debut album, One Day Remains, along with the release of that album's lead single, "Open Your Eyes." One Day Remains was released in 2004 on Wind-up Records. It received generally mixed to negative reviews and was certified Gold by the RIAA. Two other singles, "Find the Real" and "Broken Wings" were released. One Day Remains was the only album by a band with Kennedy as an official member that does not feature his guitar playing, before his 2014 album "World On Fire" as a part of Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. Following a successful tour in support of the album, Alter Bridge announced plans for a second release. The album, Blackbird, was released in 2007 on Universal Republic to mostly positive reviews. Unlike One Day Remains, which was largely written by Tremonti, Blackbird featured Kennedy's guitar playing as well as more of his songwriting contributions. Alter Bridge toured in support of Blackbird throughout 2007 and 2008, recording a concert film titled Live from Amsterdam and releasing it in 2009 via Amazon.com. It would later be released in stores in early 2011 after several delays. Alter Bridge took a temporary break in early 2009 with its members working on other projects, but the band continued writing music throughout the year. The band regrouped later that year to begin work on their third album, AB III, which was released in 2010 on Roadrunner Records worldwide, except for North America where the album was self-released on Alter Bridge Recordings via EMI. For the album, Kennedy chose to write lyrics based on his own personal experiences with faith and believing. As such, it is lyrically the band's darkest album, with Kennedy calling it the most personal album he had made since The Mayfield Four's Second Skin. AB III has received critical acclaim. A second concert film, Live at Wembley, was released on March 26, 2012. The band reunited in late 2012 and recorded from April to July 2013 their fourth album titled Fortress, which was released on September 30, 2013. The band reconvened in January 2016 and, through that July, recorded their fifth album The Last Hero, which was released on October 7, 2016. Having joined Alter Bridge primarily as lead vocalist, Kennedy began to play rhythm guitar during live performances following the release of One Day Remains. He has since played rhythm guitar on the band's subsequent studio releases, and also played lead tracks on a number of songs and during live performances.
QUESTION: What happened in 2004?
IN: Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Italian: [dZu'zeppe 'verdi]; 9 or 10 October 1813 - 27 January 1901) was an Italian opera composer. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him. By his 30s, he had become one of the pre-eminent opera composers in history.

The writer Friedrich Schiller (four of whose plays were adapted as operas by Verdi) distinguished two types of artist in his 1795 essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin ranked Verdi in the 'naive' category--"They are not...self-conscious. They do not...stand aside to contemplate their creations and express their own feelings....They are able...if they have genius, to embody their vision fully." (The 'sentimentals' seek to recreate nature and natural feelings on their own terms--Berlin instances Wagner--"offering not peace, but a sword.") Verdi's operas are not written according to an aesthetic theory, or with a purpose to change the tastes of their audiences. In conversation with a German visitor in 1887 he is recorded as saying that, whilst "there was much to be admired in [Wagner's operas] Tannhauser and Lohengrin...in his recent operas [Wagner] seemed to be overstepping the bounds of what can be expressed in music. For him "philosophical" music was incomprehensible." Although Verdi's works belong, as Rosselli admits "to the most artificial of genres...[they] ring emotionally true: truth and directness make them exciting, often hugely so." That is not to say his operas did not come as great innovations. What sounds to a modern listener as derivative of the bel canto, his first major success, Nabucco, came as a something entirely new. Never before had opera been so harmonically complex and direct. No longer was there the empty vocal display of the bel canto period composers. Granted, there is a significant amount of vocal fireworks, but they exist for the purpose of drama, not to show off singers. Aside from this, his use of the chorus was entirely new. Before Nabucco, an opera's chorus was limited to be only a background voice, another instrument. In Nabucco, this is abolished; he uses the chorus as character, to show the suffering and consensus of the people. The famous "Va, pensiero" is an example of this. The first of his "big three" operas, Rigoletto, followed by La Traviata, and ending with Il Trovatore, also was revolutionary. In a letter to Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, he says, "I conceived Rigoletto almost without arias, without finales but only an unending string of duets." And that it is. Rigoletto is one of, if not the earliest operas to abandon the traditional distinction between the sung aria, and the more speech-like recitative. After these three operas, his works took an increasing amount of time to finish, were significantly longer, and more masterfully orchestrated.
QUESTION:
What were some other things he wrote?