The hated 2002 song Steven Tyler would always love: “Phenomenal”
Steven Tyler spent his entire life believing that anything was possible with music.
He didn’t need to spend his days working a day job when he could be making some of the greatest music ever made, and he was doing everything that he could to get Aerosmith off the ground from the minute that he started performing. But there were more than a few moments throughout their career when he got his wires crossed over what he was supposed to be doing as a rock and roll frontman.
Then again, no one would have blamed Tyler for chasing after his star power as fast as he could. Anyone else would have tried their best to make hits, and as long as they kept their heads above water, Tyler was comfortable screaming his lungs out every single time they played ‘Dream On’ or trying something completely different when they were working with other songwriters.
But if you look at the trajectory of their career, ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ was one of the turning points of their career in many respects. No one would have imagined that a band that had been slogging it out for almost 30 years would somehow have a hit on the charts, but as soon as they reached the top of the charts, something seemed to switch in Tyler’s brain a little bit.
They were already becoming one of the biggest bands in the world all over again, but it did come at a price when looking at their later albums. Nine Lives was already sounding like they were trying to follow the same trends that every other band was doing, but that was dialled up to the max the minute that they began working on Just Push Play. Everything needed to be right, and that wasn’t always for the best.
If anything, a lot of the songs on that record sound like the band trying to redo the success that they made with their No. 1 hit, and while that’s all well and good if you like the song, it does get to be a little bit much after a while. There was no reason for them to keep milking the same kind of style for as long as they did, but Tyler still felt that ‘Jaded’ deserved to be given as much attention as their classics.
The song was the cleanest that Aerosmith had ever sounded, and while the lyrics were still filthy, Tyler felt that the huge chorus was enough for it to become a massive hit, saying, “It felt so phenomenal, when I hit on that melody. I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’ I didn’t even tell the band for two months. There were so many places to hang your hat. It was just a question of which hat goes where, and where the title of the song should go. I loved the way the song wrapped around itself.”
Joe Perry didn’t always agree with it, eventually saying about the Just Push Play rollout, “When the publicists decided to have females dressed as robots parade around our press conferences, I hated the idea. I thought it was a waste of money. As a press event, it was a flop. To me, the whole event felt cheesy. It was symbolic of what I felt was the most disconnected album we put our name on.”
Despite this being one of the lower points in the band’s career, it’s not like Tyler didn’t have good instincts when it came to these tunes. He was clearly a decent hook writer, and while there were more than a few times he went too far directly afterwards, this was the closest that the band ever came to sounding like they fit in with what the rest of the world was listening to around the same time.
It does sound a little weird to think that a greatest-hits album from the band will have this song alongside ‘Walk This Way’, but it’s not like the band had been selling out from that moment on. They were always out there to get massive hits, and while they may have been a bit more bluesy in their early days, there was no shame in making a blockbuster hit if the melody was actually good.
