Most people know Steven Tyler as the longtime lead singer of the rock band Aerosmith. But Tyler has also released some music on his own, including a country album.
In 2016, Tyler released We’re All Somebody From Somewhere. The 15-track record featured songs by some of country music’s most notable writers, including Brad Warren, Brett Warren, Jaren Johnston, Ross Copperman, Brett James, and more.
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“I grew up in the woods of New Hampshire…. I have more country in me than people think,” Tyler tells Rolling Stone. “Aerosmith always crossed the line, whether it was with ‘Dream On’ or ‘Train Kept A Rollin’’, or even ‘Walk This Way’ with Run-DMC. And we sang with Carrie Underwood on our last album.”
The Underwood collaboration Tyler refers to is “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You”. The song is on the band’s 2012 Music From Another Dimension! album.
Why Steven Tyler Released a Country Album
Releasing a country album wasn’t that much of a stretch for Tyler, who has always been a fan of the genre.
“It came from who I cut my teeth on,” Tyler tells Grammy.com. “My first album was Johnny Horton and The Battle of New Orleans. ‘All For The Love of a Girl’ was a huge song to me when I was 13. I didn’t know what sex was and I wasn’t really looking at girls at that age. I kind of felt that funny feeling, the way he sang that song about women. It was like, ‘Whoa. What?’ And then the Everly Brothers, their harmonies. That’s what I learned from.”
Surprisingly, Tyler wasn’t sure that Music From Another Dimension! was going to be a country album, at least at first.
“I just wanted to do a solo record,” Tyler explains. “When I started writing, I wasn’t going to go down and start yodeling. It wasn’t ‘Tyler goes country!’ In fact, I didn’t want to tell anybody that I was doing a country record. I don’t have it in me to be one genre. That was one of the magic things of Aerosmith was that I could write a song like ‘Dream On’, and then have other rock and roll songs like ‘Movin’ Out’ and ‘Make It’ and ‘One Way Street’.”
“While I was writing these songs, it wasn’t to write a country record,” he adds. “It was just to write a song with somebody that I had never written with before, really.
Tyler released three singles from We’re All Somebody From Somewhere. “Love Is Your Name”, the first single, hit the Top 20, while the following single, “Red, White & You”, hit the Top 30. The title track, Tyler’s final single from the record, failed to chart.
Photo by Victor Chavez/WireImage
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