AEROSMITH - Spot The Orphan! Page 4
by Martin Popoff

"It's a complex set of relationships that evolves over time," ventures Tom in closing, asked about his position on the whole outside songwriter situation, another thorn in the side of senior citizen Aerosmith fans. "It ebbs and flows, and you have moments like we had when we made Get Your Wings, Toys, Rocks-era records. And then we kind of like trashed ourselves and came out of it slowly, and the creative process... when we did the Done With Mirrors album, we said, look, let's jump-start the creativity in here. Let's do something to shake it up, instead of just sitting there in the studio, you know, wishing for it, for something from the past to come back. I don't know if you've seen the movie Some Kind Of Monster. It's amazing, because when I saw that movie, it was almost painful to watch them go through something that I remembered. So we said, to hell with it, we'll probably get trashed, but let's work with other people outside the band, and it got the engine going, and we put out the Permanent Vacation album. But, you know, these are Aerosmith albums. These guys... none of these people ever came in and said, 'Here's a song - play it.' I mean, there are a couple of exceptions. 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing' is maybe one of say, two or three. But the vast majority of material that we've come up with with outside writers is Aerosmith music. It gets co-written primarily with Steven and Joe, and then the whole band puts their take on it and we make it an Aerosmith song. There's been a lot of stuff along the way that we didn't use because somebody came along and said, 'Well, this can be a hit.' And we'd say, wait a minute, we're not doing it just for that. It's great to have hit songs. Every band has to have hits at some point if they want to continue what they're doing. And that could also mean deep cut obscure hits, because that's what your core fanbase wants."