In the summer of 2000 Aerosmith played Columbia Records the first songs from the album that became Just Push Play. The label liked them and asked for one more thing: a first single.
“Jaded” was the answer. Steven Tyler and Marti Frederiksen wrote it in a day at Tyler’s house on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, on a weekend when Joe Perry was not there. It went to number one at rock radio and number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s last top ten hit. It also hurt Perry, and years later both he and Tyler gave their sides of that weekend in their memoirs.
This is how the song was written, recorded, launched and filmed.
The first single
Perry and Tyler told Larry Katz of the Boston Herald that they waited five or six months, until they had a body of songs, before inviting Columbia president Don Ienner to hear them. When he came that summer, “Sunshine” was the turning point, Perry said, and from that day Ienner and Sony’s Michele Anthony were behind the project.
The label still wanted a first single, and Tyler did not think the band had one. On the album’s radio premiere in March 2001 he remembered the message: “We hear the other singles, but we need the first one.”
The dated discs agree. A set of rough mixes from 27 July 2000 holds nine songs and no “Jaded”. In late August the band’s A&R man, John Kalodner, told Billboard they had nine or ten songs done and would record more in September or October.
A day at the lake
They wrote it in August, Tyler told Katz, at the lake house. He and Frederiksen walked in and started on acoustic guitars.
The riff came while Tyler was on the phone. Frederiksen was playing around with the verse of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979”, and a variation on it became the riff. Tyler, still on the call, shouted to ask what that was, and by the time he hung up he had an idea for a verse and a melody. That is how Frederiksen told it at his 2020 Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp masterclass, and his earlier accounts, to SongwriterUniverse around 2002 and to Noisecreep in 2012, agree: the riff was his, the title and the words were Tyler’s.
They worked in what both men call the pit. By Tyler’s count years later, the song came in about two hours, and they had a demo by the end of the day.
One of the band happened to drop in that day and heard the song being born, as he put it to VH1’s All Access in 2001. Frederiksen remembered him standing at the back while he played acoustic guitar on the couch.
Video: VH1’s All Access special, with Tyler and Frederiksen recalling the day in the pit.
Tyler told VH1 that the hook came to him first as a scat, something close to “hey, jade” and a string of nonsense syllables, and that he knew at once the title would sit in that gap.
Set aside
Then the song waited. It was so strong, Tyler said in 2001, that they sat on it for a month or two while they finished other songs. The word for the gap came to him only after about two months, he said on the radio premiere, and the rest was filling in the blanks. By Frederiksen’s account Tyler wrote five sets of verses, and Frederiksen helped him choose the best lines from each.
The stutter came later. In his memoir Tyler wrote that the plain call of the title turned into a stammer “in a magic moment”. Frederiksen, who says he never had the word, has called the stutter the touch of genius. On the morning the album came out, Tyler joked to Howard Stern that it was a tribute to the show’s Stuttering John.
The song was recorded that autumn. By 18 November a near-final version existed, labelled with Brad Whitford’s original guitar part and already carrying orchestral fills. A mix on a CD-R marked “Joe” followed the next day, and another on 7 December. When six other songs went to Sterling Sound for mastering on 18 December, “Jaded” was not among them. A few days earlier a Philadelphia station had played forty seconds of it on the air, as a listener reported to the Rock This Way fan site.
The weekend without Joe
Perry was not at the lake. In Rocks, his 2014 memoir, he wrote that the weekend was meant for lyrics: only four or five songs still lacked words, and Tyler and Frederiksen went up to Sunapee to finish them. He asked to be called if they started anything new. It was a two-hour drive, and he would come.
They came back with “Jaded”. Perry heard it as a hit and the first single, but the call had never come. Frederiksen, who had been living with his family in the Perrys’ guest wing for months, told him Tyler had said calling was not necessary. “That hurt,” Perry wrote.
Tyler’s memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, gives his side. He understood that Perry was taking the weekend off to go to the movies with his wife, Billie; Perry says he never said so. And a lyric, Tyler wrote, cannot be stopped halfway. He admitted to some “sideways anger” toward the Perrys, and wrote that someone in their house gave Frederiksen a hard time for being a traitor.
None of it was aired in 2001. On VH1 that March, Perry called the song stone cold. In Rocks, the weekend is part of his case for calling Just Push Play the most disconnected album the band ever put its name on.
Building the record
The back cover of the US promo single lists who made it. Written by Tyler and Frederiksen. Produced by the Boneyard Boys, the name for Tyler, Perry, Frederiksen and Mark Hudson. Recorded by Richard Chycki and Frederiksen. Mixed by Mike Shipley with the Boneyard Boys. Strings arranged by David Campbell.
Tyler walked VH1 through some of the last decisions. The drums would open the song. He pushed up what he called the chorus bass and took a twelve-string guitar with an effect on it out of the first verse, leaving it in the second. The album’s press kit closes on the band at work on the song.
Rolling Stone reported that Whitford played three different parts on the studio version and, hours before Saturday Night Live in March 2001, was still choosing which to play live. By then “Jaded” was the only song on the album the five of them had played all the way through together. Tom Hamilton’s diary dates the first time to rehearsals for the American Music Awards, in the first week of January.
For Chycki it was a first number one at US rock radio and, as he told Produce Like a Pro in 2020, the turning point of his career.
Critics heard where it came from. Rolling Stone’s review found a “sucker-punched-ELO glow” in it, and a feature in the same magazine that April noticed that the chorus refrain echoes “Lick and a Promise” from 1976. Tyler and Hamilton, asked separately, had not noticed, and both started singing the old song.
Out of the bunker
New York’s Z100 gave “Jaded” a full premiere on Friday 5 January 2001, with Tyler and Perry on the phone from Los Angeles.
Video: Aerosmith play “Jaded” at the American Music Awards, 8 January 2001.
Three days later the band played it on television for the first time, at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles. Tina Landon choreographed a small circus around them: aerialists on silks, contortionists, stilt walkers, snakes and a whip. Hamilton played a violin-shaped Höfner, the Beatle bass. The performance drew one of the night’s few standing ovations, and Hamilton wrote in his online diary that they had drilled it over and over until it tightened.
The timing was deliberate. Ienner told the Los Angeles Times that month that, before a video existed, the label had asked the band to play the AMAs and then set up the Super Bowl, because with established artists you have to event-market the first single. On 28 January, after four days of rehearsing it, the band played “Jaded” as part of a medley in the Super Bowl XXXV halftime show in Tampa.
Radio took to it quickly. With no commercial single in the shops, “Jaded” entered the Hot 100 at number 58 as the week’s highest debut, on airplay alone. In its third week it was number one on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, where it stayed into March. On the Hot 100 it climbed every week until it reached number 7 at the end of March, the band’s first top ten since “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”. It reached 13 in the UK and 17 in the Netherlands.
The commercial single followed. In the United States it carried the album version, an acoustic mix, a “guitars” mix without the orchestra, “Angel’s Eye” and a one-minute reprise of “Under My Skin”. The UK got a CD with “Won’t Let You Down”, a bonus track from the Japanese edition of the album, and a numbered seven-inch picture disc cut to the shape of Nicole West, the model on the single’s artwork.
There were club remixes too. Jason Nevins, whose remix of Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” had topped the UK chart in 1998, made versions of “Jaded” for the dance floor that turned up on a white-label 12-inch.
On 17 March the band played it on Saturday Night Live. Two nights later, at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they played one verse before breaking into “Train Kept A-Rollin'”.
A fairy tale inside a play
Video: The “Jaded” video, directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Mila Kunis.
The band flew west from Tampa after the Super Bowl, and the video was filmed in Los Angeles on 29, 30 and 31 January 2001. The director was Francis Lawrence, who had made the “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” clip.
Lawrence explained the idea on MTV’s Making the Video. It grew out of conversations with the band, who wanted a heroine who was jaded but redeemed herself by the end. The programme summed it up as 1920s Moulin Rouge meeting the year 2050: a girl trapped in a fairy tale inside a play, living in a palace with everything except the ability to feel, until she escapes into the real world and her first feeling is a tear.
Video: MTV’s Making the Video on the “Jaded” shoot.
The palace was the Los Angeles Theatre downtown, a landmark movie palace dressed as a golden prison. Messages appear in a steamed-up mirror to guide her out. A lion boy, walking backwards on his legs under a mask, was Tyler’s idea; when she scrapes off his makeup she discovers that everything around her is fake. The band appear in the ballroom, performing for her, and in the fabric of the palace itself: Pixel Envy scanned their heads in 3D so that Perry could emerge from the fireplace and Tyler could turn up as a rocking horse and a doorknob.
Aerialists, stilt walkers and an elephant filled the ballroom. A circus was something Tyler had wanted for years, Lawrence said, and he knew the band had been working with Cirque du Soleil performers. The circus recalls a night in Las Vegas in December 1999, when the band saw Cirque du Soleil’s O and Tyler climbed onto the practice trapeze backstage.
The heroine was Mila Kunis, then seventeen and playing Jackie on That ’70s Show: an actress people knew, as the making-of put it, with two faces, sensual and at the same time young and naive enough for a fairy tale. When her scenes wrapped, she stayed to watch the band perform.
MTV premiered the video on 13 February, at the end of the Making the Video episode, and put it on TRL two days later. By mid-March a re-cut with new angles on the last chorus had replaced it. It won Best Hard Rock Clip of the Year at the Billboard Music Video Awards and Video of the Year at the Boston Music Awards, as the band’s own archive recalls.
What it is about
The finished lyric sketches a young woman who takes after her mother but seems, to the singer, already out of date, and the chorus softens into an endearment.
Tyler kept the meaning open. On the radio premiere he called the song imaginary: the last line takes the blame so that he would not be pointing a finger at anyone, and he wanted it kept vague. On Z100 in January he said it depicted the band’s life, and Perry added that they had not wanted to be too literal. In March he gave dotmusic a wider frame: the more information the internet brings, the more everyone is jaded, and nothing is what it seems. The song, he said, is about a girl overloaded with it.
After
“Jaded” was nominated for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 2002 Grammy Awards, and the album for Best Rock Album; U2 took both. VH1 later ranked it 86th among the hundred greatest songs of the 2000s, and in 2021 the RIAA certified it gold.
At the time, Ienner told Rolling Stone that the label had been “blown away” by what came out of the Boneyard: it sounded, he said, like the band’s third record. A decade later Tyler wrote that Ienner had told him something starker. Without the song, Sony would have dropped the band.
For Frederiksen it was a first pop hit, and he has said it changed his life and opened the doors to work with Ozzy Osbourne, Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams and Sheryl Crow. He and Tyler tried for the same effect with “Girls of Summer” in 2002; in 2012 he admitted it never connected the same way.
In September 2013 Frederiksen played “Jaded” at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Tyler came up from the audience, took his chair and told the room how the song was written.
Sources
Books
- Perry, J., with Ritz, D. (2014). Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith. Simon & Schuster. Chapter “Push”.
- Tyler, S., with Dalton, D. (2011). Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? Ecco/HarperCollins.
Interviews and broadcasts, 2001
- Larry Katz, group interview with all five members, Boston, early 2001, for the Boston Herald. Larry Katz Collection, Northeastern University.
- SFX Radio Network, Just Push Play world premiere broadcast, 1 to 4 March 2001.
- Z100, New York, premiere with Tyler and Perry by phone, 5 January 2001.
- The Howard Stern Show, 6 March 2001.
Video
- VH1, All Access special on the making of the album, March 2001.
- MTV, Making the Video: “Jaded”, 13 February 2001.
- “Jaded” at the American Music Awards, 8 January 2001.
- “Jaded” official video, directed by Francis Lawrence, 2001.
- Album electronic press kit, 2001.
- Aerosmith, “From the Aero Vault” post on the “Jaded” video.
Press, 2000 to 2001
- Rolling Stone: “Rock’s Longest-Running Dysfunctional Family Sitcom”, April 2001; album review, March 2001; news feature with Don Ienner, February 2001.
- Billboard (Melinda Newman), 25 August 2000; Billboard chart reports, January to March 2001; ABC News, 9 January 2001; Los Angeles Times, Don Ienner interview, January 2001; dotmusic, March 2001; Columbia Records website and Aeroforce One fan club reports, January and February 2001. All as preserved in the Rock This Way news archive.
Diary and fan archive
- Tom Hamilton, “News From The Road”, aerosmith.com, 2001.
- Rock This Way news archive, 2000 to 2001, including the promo single credits, the Z100 interview, chart runs, single formats and the video shoot dates.
Later interviews
- Marti Frederiksen: SongwriterUniverse, c. 2002; Noisecreep, November 2012; Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp masterclass, 27 July 2020.
- Steven Tyler and Marti Frederiksen at the Bluebird Cafe, Nashville, 3 September 2013.
- Richard Chycki, Produce Like a Pro, November 2020.
Reference
- Recording Academy, Aerosmith nominations.
- Discogs, Nevins vs. Aerosmith, “Jaded”, white-label 12-inch, 2001.
- Loudwire, “Led Zeppelin IV Now 24x Platinum, Aerosmith Gain Six New Gold + Platinum Certifications”, November 2021.
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