Excerpt: Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry Discuss Their New Album, 'Music From Another Dimension!'
The following in an excerpt taken from the Holiday 2012 issue of Guitar World. For the full story, pick up the issue on newsstands now, or in our online store.
“We really wanted to give it the feel that you were in the room with the band,” Perry says. “Especially with headphones on. That’s how you get your best sound and have an intimate kind of experience. But loud, and rocky! I think there are a lot of different atmospheres on the record.”
“It truly is music from another dimension,” insists Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s over-the-top lead singer, Perry’s longtime “toxic twin,” lifetime musical collaborator and frequent sparring partner. “It’s from us and it’s from our alter-egos and psyches and our greatness and our fucked-up-ness. It’s just really a piece of who we all are.”
Tyler himself has always been quite a piece of work, and so, in a way, is Music from Another Dimension! The album skews schizophrenically between schmaltzy over-produced Tyler ballads and plenty of the bone-crunching hard rock hookiness that’s been Aerosmith’s most glorious asset ever since they first came out of Boston in the early Seventies. And perhaps more than any other member of Aerosmith, it is Joe Perry who carries that classic rock tradition with all the requisite attitude and swagger. At age 62, he remains very much the archetypal rock guitar god.
“Joe Perry?” Tyler demands. “If you want to hear rock and roll at its finest, just listen to Joe’s song ‘Oh Yeah’ on the new album. Then go listen to ‘Out Go the Lights.’ I haven’t heard anybody do anything like that in a while. Put that up against anything on Rocks or Toys in the Attic. I think it stands up.”
“We made the record that I hope people have been waiting for,” Perry says. “All these years, they’ve been saying, ‘Why don’t you make a record that sounds like the old stuff?’ But like anything that’s been around for 30 years, the classic Aerosmith stuff has acquired a certain patina. You can’t just instantly recreate that. You can’t go back. But you can certainly take that influence and use it when you’re doing new music. And that’s what we did.”
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