The one line Steven Tyler called the “most precious” of his career
There’s always one common question around the evolution of Aerosmith: when did they get bad?
No matter which way people look at it, there are always going to be purists from back in the day that hate what they’re doing now or think that they have strayed too far away from their rock and roll roots. That might be true on a few occasions, but when it comes to their track record, venturing towards pop has never been an outright horrible idea.
After all, the band had always made ballads even on their greatest albums. If everyone got mad that they began making tracks like ‘Angel’ back in the 1980s because it sounded too wimpy, chances are they never bothered to get to the end of Toys in the Attic to hear ‘You See Me Crying’ or listened to Steven Tyler’s touching ode to his daughter a few albums later on ‘Mia’. Melody was never a bad word to them, but it was always about how they used it.
Let’s look at the Just Push Play era, for example. The band are far from subpar behind the scenes, but when listening to the standalone single ‘Girls of Summer’, it’s understandable why even Joe Perry had to jump ship. This wasn’t the kind of band he signed up for, and even though there were opportunities to stretch, making songs that would have impressed a panel of talent show judges wasn’t what they should have been doing.
And while it’s easy to pin the whole thing on professional songwriters, it’s not like their collaborations hadn’t worked in the past. All of the band’s best material in the late 1980s up until the early 1990s had some of the finest songwriters of their time, and while Desmond Child did have some weapons-grade cheese in his catalogue, it’s not like he didn’t understand the kind of sleaze that Aerosmith built their brand on when they got started.
Once they started getting sentimental about their music, one of the most beautiful songs fell into their lap when Diane Warren came to them with ‘I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing’. The original idea was to give the song to a traditional crooner like Celine Dion, but after only hearing the song once, Tyler knew that nothing was going to get in the way of him recording the tune when asked to work on the soundtrack to Armageddon.
Before the song was even finished, Tyler said the first lines of the song hooked him in from the beginning, saying, “‘I could lie awake just to watch you sleep…’ I mean, how much in love with someone do you have to be to do that? But [Warren] nailed it. That’s one of the most precious opening lines of any song I’ve ever heard. And with a movie behind it, that’s like the Titanic coming into shore riding a five hundred-foot tidal wave.”
While the last thing that most Aerosmith fans wanted was for them to take cues from the same lady that sang ‘My Heart Will Go On’, it’s not like they don’t perform the song well. There’s all of the Tyler-isms throughout the entire song, and while many of the guitar nerds would have liked for Perry’s guitar to be turned up a little bit in the mix, the production behind everything is half the reason why it became one of the biggest smashes of the late 1990s.
Was it a mixed bag? Absolutely. The fact that the band’s next album felt like them trying to redo the success of this one track at least six different times was more than a few steps too far, but when you hit on something this perfect, why the hell would you not want to make the most of your time in the spotlight?
