“A real song”: The classic track Steven Tyler didn’t ever consider releasing
For most songwriters, songs are never truly finished. Oh, they may be on vinyl or streaming for people to hear, but there are usually just a few times when people can say that a tune is 100% finished and shouldn’t be improved in the slightest. Even when you’re in a rock and roll institution like Aerosmith, though, Steven Tyler admitted never wanting to flesh out ‘Dream On’ when he first dreamed it up on the piano.
Considering that this was the same group that would be known for some of the sleaziest rock and roll imaginable, the thought of Tyler making a glorified classical-sounding song on the side feels absolutely insane. There were signs that he could do more than just rock and roll as far back as his days in his first band, Chain Reaction, but this was the kind of thing ripped straight out of an old Brahms sonata.
That’s not necessarily by mistake, either. Tyler had already started learning a lot of classical pieces secondhand from his father, so when he started honing his craft, it didn’t take him long to layer that same kind of sophisticated harmony on top of everything. Just look at what he did on ‘You See Me Crying’ and ‘Mia’ later, and you’ll hear where Tyler’s heart was after he got through every one of his bluesy chops.
Since hard rock was still a relatively new term, this is also arguably the first power ballad to gain mainstream traction. Despite Kiss claiming to birth the medium with their ballad ‘Beth’, ‘Dream On’ really was the first one that people knew and could recite lyrics to while Led Zeppelin was still making bluesy rave-ups and the occasional slow track like ‘Thank You’.
When Tyler first wrote the tune, he never really considered it to be an Aerosmith hit or anything. It was just the end of the summer on the East Coast, and since he was feeling lonely without his friends, the now-iconic melody just came into his head, which he instructed Joe Perry how to play when transposing it over to the guitar.
Despite it being fairly close to the chest, Tyler said that he never considered the tune something on Aerosmith’s radar, saying, “‘Dream On’ came of me playing the piano when I was about seventeen or eighteen, and I didn’t know anything about writing a song. It was just this little sonnet that I started playing one day. I never thought it would end up being a real song or anything.”
Once he actually bothered to flesh it out, it took its sweet time getting to classic status. Before it had been considered their signature hit and then reintroduced to the world through Eminem, the record originally fell off the charts when it was released, only getting a resurgence once it was re-released following the success of Toys in the Attic.
But let Tyler’s trepidation be a lesson for all of you hoping to try your hand at writing songs. There are many different avenues one can take to find that magic, but sometimes, a tune that might not seem too special ends up becoming one of the foundational parts of your career. It might not be what you want, but it’s what the rest of the world needs.
