AEROSMITH - Spot The Orphan! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

"'Same Old Song And Dance' is a challenge because I do a semi solo on the end of it," says Tom, when asked about personal highlights or hard bits of the current set list - Aerosmith is indeed out rocking various joints right now, live. "We go into the ending part of the song, and just keep it going and going and going, and we build the energy, and what happens is, the band cuts out at the end of the main body of the song. Steven does some cool vocal stuff over Joey's... you know, he keeps going, playing twos and fours, and then when we come back in, everybody keeps playing, but I'm kind of playing a lead bass guitar kind of thing. So that's a challenge every night to make that work and not make it too planned and play off the top of my head but play some coherent stuff. So that's a challenge. It's also physically challenging because it's all triplets, so it's kind of an endurance song."

As happily alluded to, the two heaviest songs off of Just Push Play are on here. Does that tell us anything about where the next album is going to go?

"I think it's us saying, 'Look, you know, we would love it if people would listen to these songs' (laughs). It's a funny thing. When the Just Push Play album came out, it like went into a void. And I was kind of surprised. There are all kinds of different reasons why people love or don't love an Aerosmith album, but I thought song-wise, it was a really good album. And I heard the version of 'Beyond Beautiful' that's on the new album, two years later. And I hadn't heard that version for a couple of years. No one had, because they were just kind of sitting in a vault. And the song was just so heavy. It really goes with some of our vintage material. We wanted to present that to our fans and say, 'Look, it does go with it' (laughs). By the way, that song, it's not in the set right now, but that's very challenging; that's a hard song to play."

AEROSMITH - Spot The Orphan! Page 3