Aerosmith has dominated my life over the course of the last week, but they aren’t the only artist I’ve been listening to. This week’s playlist highlights my two favorite Aerosmith songs ever written, but also a protest anthem for the ages, a Folk crooner I’d never heard before, and one of the most famous songs…
***1/2 For some reason, Nine Lives just seems cooler than Get a Grip. A part of it may be because it doesn’t have a freakin pierced cow udder on the case, but I think it has more to do with the effort that Aerosmith was putting in to make their album sound different. Utilizing strange…
***1/2 There’s nothing really wrong with Get a Grip. It marked the peak of Aerosmith’s commercial success, spawning four hit singles, tons of regular MTV rotation for their many music videos, and millions of copies sold. For mainstream Rock radio, Get a Grip was the best album Aerosmith ever. But for the rest of us,…
****1/2 It took over a decade, but in 1989, Aerosmith finally came out with an album that can be considered on the same level as their best work from the mid-’70s. Like on Permanent Vacation, Aerosmith enlisted the help of songwriters Desmond Child and Jim Vallance, but the difference here is these outside collaborators only…
**** It seemed like everything was over for Aerosmith until they got the call from producer Rick Rubin, who was working with a young rap group called Run-DMC that were interested in collaborating with Aerosmith and re-cutting their classic record “Walk This Way.” Seizing the opportunity to become relevant again, Aerosmith jumped at it and…
*** Aerosmith fans may have tricked themselves into thinking the return of Joe Perry and Brad Whitford to the band meant this comeback album was good, but the truth is this is as bad as Aerosmith ever got. Completely blowing their big return, the members of Aerosmith rushed to get an album out in order…
***1/2 Often considered the worst Aerosmith album ever, if you even consider it an Aerosmith album at all (considering its lack of both Joe Perry and Brad Whitford), Rock in a Hard Place is an album for which I have always nonetheless rooted. It was the last Aerosmith album that I ever bought in an…
**** I’ve always been intrigued by Pandora’s Box. It was years after I thought that I had listened to every song Aerosmith ever recorded that I discovered it, and I was immediately filled with excitement. It was my first box set, and even though it contained a lot of music that I already had, the…
***1/2 For some reason, the members of Aerosmith seem to look back more fondly on Night in the Ruts than Draw the Line. I’m not sure why. It may have been less painful to record, but Night in the Ruts struggled to produce any songs worth remembering and was certainly the worst Aerosmith album up…
***1/2 Draw the Line has always been viewed as the album where Aerosmith started to slip, and indeed it is. Though there are a number of songs on the album that are right at home in Aerosmith’s ’70s catalog like the title track and “I Wanna Know Why,” there are just as many songs that…
The Soundtrack Online 