“We’ll see how this flies”: which pop diva did Aerosmith want to collaborate with?
On the surface, it seems strange that Aerosmith had such a tough 1980s. After all, the bad boys from Boston more or less defined the 1980s rock band the decade before, from the sound to the look and everything in between. One would assume that the Reagan era would be a spectacular homecoming for them, one where they would reap the rewards for inspiring the generation that came next.
However, that’s often not how it works when it comes to art. Just because you do it first doesn’t automatically mean people think you do it best. In fact quite often when you do it first, the generation that you inspire do it faster, slicker and that little bit sexier. You may have been ahead of your time, but they’re of the time.
Just as Psycho inspired the likes of Friday The 13th and Halloween, yet looks a little old hat when compared to the lurid, technicolour thrills of the latter films, Aerosmith ran the risk of becoming a legacy band in the 1980s. In the latter half of the decade, something had to change. They steadied the ship with 1987’s Get A Grip and hurtled back into the limelight with 1989’s Pump, albums with all the nutritional value of a greasy cheeseburger the size of a birthday cake but just as ludicrously satisfying in the moment.
Aerosmith were back. Proudly showing those young whippersnappers exactly how it’s done. However, the secret to these albums were the presence of outside songwriters for the very first time in the band’s career. Some of the biggest hits of the band’s career, like ‘Angel’, ‘Janie’s Got A Gun’ and ‘What It Takes’ were all collaborations with professional songwriters like Tom Hamilton and Desmond Child.
How did these collaborations effect the music of Aerosmith?
While a lot of these were hypercharged, glam-metal variants of the kind of good-time blues-rock jams that made Aerosmith’s name, a few of these hits were a little more subdued. The aforementioned ‘What It Takes’ was an outright power ballad, arguably signposted the direction that Aerosmith would take in the 1990s better than anything. Its very telling that after a few singles from Pump dropped in 1990, the biggest hits the band had were… a slight departure from their normal sound.
‘Cryin’ was the first shot across the bow. A great big country-rock power ballad with hooks for days but worse was yet to come. When writing a song for the Michael Bay blockbuster Armageddon, Linda Perry wrote a song that she envisioned would be sang by Celine Dion. Instead, Aerosmith got the gig of singing ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’, by quite some distance the biggest and some might say worst hit of their career.
Despite the cheese and the sentimentality, the truth is that Aerosmith had been preparing for a break like this for the past decade when they released ‘…Miss A Thing’. They retained that desire to write a big, dewy eyes ballad long after its release. In fact, they made up a considerable amount of their 2012 album Music From Another Dimenion!.
Perhaps it was that side of Aerosmith, Steven Tyler, was thinking about when he envisioned a Grammy performance with an unlikely special guest. “My vision was to sing with Adele at the Grammys and do ‘All Fall Down’ or ‘Another Last Goodbye, because they’re very much like that, but also very much Aerosmith. So, we’ll see how all this shit flies in today’s world.”
Perhaps those 1990s power ballads were the sellout move that people decried at the time. One way or another, Aerosmith had an innate ability to connect with people, whether that was with a killer riff or an open-hearted, wailing power ballad. I know which side I prefer but there’s millions who’d disagree, and you can’t argue with that. Sort of.
