Aerosmith News

Writing Songs, and how to play "Same Old Song and Dance"

Joe Perry: One of the most important things for any musician to become involved in is songwriting. The very first thing we all have to get over is fear: don't be afraid to try writing your own songs. This is something I learned, along with many other things, from working with Steven (Tyler, Aerosmith singer).

When Steven and I first met, he was a more experienced musician than I was. He's a couple of years older than me, and he'd already been in the recording studio and had spent time writing original material. With the formation of Aerosmith, he taught us all about songwriting structure, and basically, the many different aspects of how to write songs. Most significantly, he taught us to not be afraid to dive in.

Before meeting Steven, Tom (Hamilton, Aerosmith bassist) and I hadn't yet written any of our own stuff. We were happy to play songs by the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Zeppelin, Hendrix, etc. There were so many great songs to play, we thought we didn't need to write any of our own! But once we hooked up with Steven, we could see that this was the only way to go if we really wanted to get anywhere as a band.

Brad Whitford: I think that the most important thing to remember about being a musician, whatever you aspirations may be, is that you should try to gain something of value, creatively speaking, from the experience. Songwriting affords you the opportunity to learn how to express yourself in different ways, and to express a wide range of emotions. It also helps you to discover things about your own personality. And it's very rewarding when you feel you've written something that can stand on it's own.

Joe Perry: Brad and I were both heavily influenced by the playing of the British guitar heros of the Sixties, like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Peter Green. A large part of Aerosmith, as a band, is a product of those influences. The Sixties recordings of each of those guitar players are incredible: all three played like virtuosos, and the sound of the Les Paul/Marshall combination was, to me, devastating. The guitar tone on the first Jeff Beck album (Truth) and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton album still sounds unbelievable today. These albums set the standard for tone. Once we heard that sound, we knew we had to get a piece of that.

Brad Whitford: Beck and Page were pioneers. They had picked on the influence of American blue and turned it into something different and exciting, and it brought the blues back to America in a new form. It was already here in our laps, but they took the influence of southern black music and Chicago blues and turned it on it's head. And, at that time, there was no doubt in my mind that the Les Paul was the greatest electric guitar in the world. When I first saw Jimmy Page playing a Les Paul through a stack of Marshalls, it thought, Holy shit. My jaw was on the ground. That was it for me. We, as a band, were all inspired by that, and we just carried the flag from there.

Joe Perry: We were lucky too, because a lot of the original blues guys were still touring when we started out, so we could see them firsthand, too. We'd sit and compare the Rolling Stones' version of "Carol" with Chuck Berry's original, and you could see a stylistic progression there. Brad's right: those guys were visionaries, they got that feeling and inspiration from the blues, and they tried to capture and be it. And that, in turn, fired us up.

The funny thing is, we'd been writing songs for a few years before I realized that Aerosmith, as a band, had a particular sounds of their own. To me, we were still just trying to do our own version of the music we lovedm as opposed to thinking, This is what Aerosmith should sound like. I didn't even recognize the band's identity until I started to listen back to good live recordings. This is when I realized that the rhythm structure of a song like "Same Old Song and Dance" comes straight from the blues, and that's what I like about the song in the first place.

Figure 1a illustrates the intro riff to "Same Old Song and Dance", which is played with a blues boogie-shuffle type feel. You'll notice that I play the riff primarily down in the second position, moving between E5 and D5 chords. On the last beat of bar 2, I play an E5 barre chord up in the seventh position. That chord was actually played by an overdubbed guitar.

For the verse section (Figure 1b), the chord movement still sounds like E5-D5-E5, but I play on the D, G, and B strings only. Notice how rhythmically similar this pattern is to the intro riff.

The chorus (Figure 1c) is made up of a progression of root-fifth power chords, with the exception of the first chord, Gsus2. This chord is basically a G5 power chord with the second, A, added.Whitford: If you listen to "One Way Street" from Aerosmith, you'll see that is hass essentially the same feel as "Same Old Song and Dance". But both songs have these little dynamic changes in them that we rehearsed the shit out of; these are the things that make "Same Old Song and Dance" more than just a straight I-IV-V (one, four, five) blues thing, even though it still has that same good ol' blues feeling. And when we play it live, the audience goes nuts.