About The Songs on 'Joe Perry'
Chart Attack, Canada
July 13, 2005
Aerosmith's Joe Perry Goes It Alone
With Aerosmith on some sort of one-year break, guitarist Joe Perry made a homespun self-titled solo record in the spirit of Aerosmith’s Honkin’ On Bobo, but with mostly original songs rather than old blues covers.
"I'm pretty sure I've played everything in one form or another for the guys in the band," Perry says on whether any of the garage-y traditional rockers on his solo album had ever been proposed as Aerosmith songs. "A song like 'Hold On Me,' I think I've had that, with lyrics as well, and it sounded like it sounds now, when I played it for them. And then there are other things, like 'Shakin' My Cage,' where actually, just that first initial guitar riff, I had a different arrangement and a different song and with no lyrics or anything, that we actually worked on for Honkin' On Bobo, and it just never gelled."
Perry figures some of the songs simply weren't right for the 'Smith.
"Sometimes you just throw it against the wall and if it's right, it sticks. If it doesn't, it doesn't, and that's just the process you go through to write songs," he says. "You try stuff out and sometimes you end up with something that is worthy of a second listen and sometimes you don't. In the case of that song, we worked on it and it just never fell into place. So I just took that initial riff and built a totally different song around it. So, yes, a few of them have been exposed to the band, and for various reasons they didn't get used, or there might not have been room on the record."
Along with the rejected and retooled Aerosmith songs, there were also tracks that never saw the hallowed rehearsal hall of Mr. Tyler.
"A song like 'Ten Years,' I never really put that out there as a song for the band to play," says Perry. "It's too personal and too much of a family heirloom, so to speak. But I can give you another little anecdote. I had the music for 'Lonely,' which I actually had the chorus for. But I didn't have a verse or a real arrangement, and then one night, probably in August or September, there was a commercial on TV that had the Johnny Cash song, 'I've Been Everywhere' [sings it]. That was on a commercial, and I heard it real late at night and I said, 'Wow, that's a real cool premise for a song,' so that's kinda where the lyrics for 'Lonely' came from — I've been everywhere too."
—Martin Popoff
July 13, 2005
Aerosmith's Joe Perry Goes It Alone
With Aerosmith on some sort of one-year break, guitarist Joe Perry made a homespun self-titled solo record in the spirit of Aerosmith’s Honkin’ On Bobo, but with mostly original songs rather than old blues covers.
"I'm pretty sure I've played everything in one form or another for the guys in the band," Perry says on whether any of the garage-y traditional rockers on his solo album had ever been proposed as Aerosmith songs. "A song like 'Hold On Me,' I think I've had that, with lyrics as well, and it sounded like it sounds now, when I played it for them. And then there are other things, like 'Shakin' My Cage,' where actually, just that first initial guitar riff, I had a different arrangement and a different song and with no lyrics or anything, that we actually worked on for Honkin' On Bobo, and it just never gelled."
Perry figures some of the songs simply weren't right for the 'Smith.
"Sometimes you just throw it against the wall and if it's right, it sticks. If it doesn't, it doesn't, and that's just the process you go through to write songs," he says. "You try stuff out and sometimes you end up with something that is worthy of a second listen and sometimes you don't. In the case of that song, we worked on it and it just never fell into place. So I just took that initial riff and built a totally different song around it. So, yes, a few of them have been exposed to the band, and for various reasons they didn't get used, or there might not have been room on the record."
Along with the rejected and retooled Aerosmith songs, there were also tracks that never saw the hallowed rehearsal hall of Mr. Tyler.
"A song like 'Ten Years,' I never really put that out there as a song for the band to play," says Perry. "It's too personal and too much of a family heirloom, so to speak. But I can give you another little anecdote. I had the music for 'Lonely,' which I actually had the chorus for. But I didn't have a verse or a real arrangement, and then one night, probably in August or September, there was a commercial on TV that had the Johnny Cash song, 'I've Been Everywhere' [sings it]. That was on a commercial, and I heard it real late at night and I said, 'Wow, that's a real cool premise for a song,' so that's kinda where the lyrics for 'Lonely' came from — I've been everywhere too."
—Martin Popoff
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