The Back-Burner: Aerosmith Outtakes & Demos

After many failed attempts in 2006, 2007 and 2009, the band finally started work on the new album with an 8-day songwriting session that Joe Perry missed.

Earlier this year, Aerosmith recorded a series of demos in Los Angeles. Tentative track titles included “Bobbing For Piranha,” “Asphalt” and “Legendary Child.” “They still sound like Aerosmith,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt in a recent cover story about Tyler. “Slinky, riff-rock, big -chorused soul ballads, leaning more Seventies than Nineties.”

Andy Greene for Rolling Stone

We know that at least one of the song ideas written during these sessions developed into “Beautiful”.

Jack Douglas mentioned in an interview with ASCAP, that 4 more songs were left from the sessions, outside the deluxe version.

And that doesn’t mean we recorded 20. We recorded 24, so there’s four left over. Then there’s material that we only developed, so I would guess in that first few months, we developed about 28 or 30 ideas…

Jack Douglas

The recording sessions took place in Boston in 2011 at the band’s Vindaloo/Pandora’s Box studio. The footage above includes clips of a few unused riffs and ideas by Steven and Joe.

Originally Episode 7 was given to RollingStone/Yahoo as a web extra, covering the recording of “Can’t Stop Loving You” with Carrie Underwood, but has since become unavailable from their web, hence its omission from this video. Patrick Casey Tebo recorded, edited and produced the original material.

Aerosmith’s Carrie Underwood Duet: Did Every Member Consider It A Match Made In Country ‘Rocks’ Heaven?

Music from a New Dimension took “only” nine months to make—though it was not nine solid months. Roughly speaking, the flow of the album’s recording went this way: The first three months, which consisted of songwriting and recording of basic tracks for most songs, took place at Aerosmith’s Boston studio, Pandora’s Box. The studio was originally built a decade ago by Douglas, designer John Storyk and the group’s longtime (now former) engineer Jay Messina, then updated by Douglas about a year ago. Additionally, Perry recorded some guitar parts at his own fabulously equipped Boston studio, The Boneyard. From there, the action shifted to Huart’s (and co-owner Phil laurigas) Swing House complex. Many overdubs, some re-tracking and ground-up work on two cover tunes— The Temptations’ obscure “Shakey Ground” and The Yardbirds’ “I’m Not Talking”— as well as a new ballad by Diane Warren called “All Fall Down” (featuring Carrie Underwood) were done at Swing Time. Additional recording (such as Underwood’s lead vocal) and some mixing took place at Huart’s personal studio, Spitfire. Several tracks were mixed by Neal Avron (Linkin Park, Fallout Boy) on an SSL 4000 G-Plus at Paramount Studios in Hollywood; others by the prolific Chris LordAlge on the 72-input SSL 4000 E Series board in his Tarzana (L.A.) studio; the rest were handled by Huart and Douglas on Spitfire’s 4o-input SSL 4000 G.

Jack Douglas on first sessions in Boston: “First is the writing process. The idea of the album was to write it and make a record that really sounds like the band. They come into my office with dry [acoustic] guitars and I have an old cassette machine and I start recording. I’m writing stuff up on a chalk board behind me, with fake titles attached to the different riffs and ideas. [Notorious Boston mobster] Whitey Bolger had just been captured so we had one song that was called ‘Welcome Home, Whitey!’ There was one called ‘Butt Weight’ [as in the late-night commercial offers that say ‘But wait!’]. There was another with the working title ‘We Know Where Your Kids Are.’ Then we would take them to the next room over, which is a bigger conference/rehearsal room where we had a piano, some small amps and their instruments, and we would record into my computer and start to work the licks up. Everybody is sitting at this big table and each guy is putting in ideas. We would work stuff up in there, record it and listen back to it for a couple of days, make changes, and as soon as it got to be a recordable song, we’d go right into the [main studio] room and cut it while it was fresh.”