Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  If you’ve been a problem since way back when,

  did the noise in your head bother you then?

  Forget “fuck me,” “fuck them,” “fuck you,”

  does the noise in my head bother you?

  Are you fucked no matter what you do?

  No. If your life’s been a lie then ask ’em true,

  does the noise in my head bother you?

  That one I wrote at my kitchen table up in Sunapee. I love tongue twisters, word games, and shit like that:

  Well well well

  I feel just like I’m fallin’ in love

  There’s a new cool

  Some kind of verbooty

  It fits me like a velvet glove . . . yeah

  And it’s cool

  Shoo ba pa du ba

  She’s talkin’ to me juba to jive . . . yeah

  My divorce from Teresa years later, in 2006 (wait, it’s coming), put the song “Hole in my Soul” into my heart’s perspective . . .

  I’m down a one-way street

  With a one-night stand

  With a one-track mind

  Out in no-man’s-land

  (The punishment sometimes don’t seem to fit the crime)

  Yeah there’s a hole in my soul

  But one thing I’ve learned

  For every love letter written

  There’s another one burned

  (So tell me how it’s gonna be this time)

  Is it over

  Is it over

  Is it over

  ’Cause I’m blowin’ out the flame

  That kinda defines getting laid out on the road. I finally put into words how fooling around on someone you love back home could kick back on you. The one thing I’ve learned from being a singer and a poet is that it’s often not what’s been said . . . but how you lived it.

  I wrote “Hole in My Soul” with Desmond Child. It’s one of my favorite songs. I came to him with the chorus, then went to the band and said, “Tom, what if you played this on a fretless bass?” I asked him to please, please get one. “There’s a HOLE in my soul that’s been killing me forever . . .” What a chorus that is. With every album we ever did, I tried to dig out the parts with the other members of the band to perfection. Listen to Tom’s bass and Joey’s snare and foot from Pump on up. I pushed the rhythm sections up louder than they’d ever been. I worked on parts for Tom that I knew would pop out, and when it came time to mix, I pushed those parts out and added 3k to them, so they stuck out like the hard nipples that were about to listen to it.

  Photo shoot for Chrome Hearts, 2006. (Laurie Stark/Laurie Lynn Stark Photography)

  While we were tracking Nine Lines, the end of “Hole in My Soul” was playing . . . Chelsea and Taj walked into the studio with Teresa. I looked over and I said to them, “Good night, Chelsea. Good night, Taj.” It’s whispered at the end of the track.

  Laurie from Chrome Hearts took this picture of Chelsea and Daddy in 2006. (Laurie Stark/Laurie Lynn Stark Photography)

  Ten years prior to making Nine Lives I’d been listening to the sound intro on the THX commercial that always plays: “The audience is listening.” Joe had bought this fucking guitar that would tune itself. It was a computerized Les Paul or something. So I took the guitar and I untuned it, all over the fucking planet. I said, “Put that over on the left side of the studio,” and he hit the button and it went wwwooowwww trying to retune itself and wound up back in the key “Taste of India” started in. Then I said, “Can you control the time it takes to get to the chord . . . slow it down?” And he goes, “Oh yeah,” so we slowed it down to this intro, ten seconds, and I took that guitar, detuned the whole thing again, and put it over on the right side . . . then we did it again and panned it over to the right side, and when we played ’em altogether we got this incredible sound that was the equivalent of shuuuu, the audience is listening but even better than the commercial THX. Then we added this loop that producer Glen Ballard had lying around from Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill and I went, “CAN I USE THAT?” And he said, “It’s yours (if you pay for it).” We added a track of this Indian singer, and that’s the music behind the opening verse of “Taste of India.”

  God I love the sweet taste of India

  Lingers on the tip of my tongue

  Gotta love the sweet taste of India

  Blame it on the beat of the drum

  God I love the sweet taste of India

  Lingers on the tip of my tongue

  Gotta know that what’s gotten into ya

  Any cat man do when it’s done

  Now she’s got that kind of love incense

  That lives in her back room

  And when it mixes with the funk, my friend

  It turns into perfume

  Then you get to the next verse and listen to what the drums do . . . EXPLOSION!

  When you make love to the sweet tantric priestess

  You drink in the bliss of delight

  But I’m not afraid when I dance with a shadow (BOOM!)

  I went to an antiques store and I found this little red church about a foot high and half a foot wide. It had a crank on the side of it and I went, “What’s this?” The shopkeeper said, “Crank it.” It had three harmonicas and a bellows. We used it at the end of “Full Circle.”

  Time

  Don’t let it slip away

  Raise yo’ drinkin’ glass

  Here’s to yesterday

  In time

  We’re all gonna trip away

  Don’t piss heaven off

  We got hell to pay

  Come full circle

  On the next track, “Something’s Gotta Give,” I took two trash cans, drumsticks, turned the cans upside down, and played ’em. First song Joe and I ever wrote with Marti Frederiksen. Next track . . . a ballad, “Ain’t That a Bitch.”

  Up in smoke, you’ve lost another lover

  As you take a hit off your last cigarette

  Strung out, burned out

  Yeah you’re down on your luck

  And you don’t give a huh!

  Till the best part of you starts to . . . twitch

  Ain’t that a . . . bitch

  “The Farm” is Marko Hudson! He wrote most of that. One of his finest fucking moments. He arranged the orchestra, too.

  Buckle up straightjack Insanity is such a drag

  Jellybean Thorazine, transcendental jet lag,

  Sanity

  I ain’t gonna feeling like a piñata

  Sucker punch

  Blow lunch motherload, pigeonhole

  I’m feeling like I’m gonna explode

  TAKE ME TO THE FARM

  I wrote “Pink” with Richie Supa at the Marlin Hotel down in South Beach, Florida. I’d be writing and go, “Fuck.” I’d turn the lights on when the sun went down. I turned the lights off when the sun came blasting through that big bay window. I loved writing lyrics at night—it was more mysterious than in the day, and I could evoke my demons when no one was around to bother me. The only problem was when normal people got up, like our producer Glen Ballard, who was also a cowriter on “Pink,” they would expect me to go in and do my vocals later that morning, when what I really needed was some shut-eye. So most days at the old Marlin, we started recording at about 1:00 P.M., which left me five more hours of daylight before I sat down at the table again to turn the light on—this went on for five months until I started growing neon hair.

  Me and me at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. This is the head they made of me for the video of “Pink.” (Erin Brady)

  Pink it was love at first sight

  Pink when I turn out the light, and

  Pink gets me high as a kite

  And I think everything is going to be all right

  No matter what we do tonight

  Pink you could be my flamingo

  Pink is the new conni lingo

  Pink like a deco umbrel
la

  It’s kink—but you don’t ever tell her

  I threw in that line “It’s kink” because Richie Supa thought I should call the song “Kink.” I said, “Richie, we can’t call the song ‘Kink.’ My life is kink. I am kink!”

  When I got hungry and thirsty for some South Beach sustenance, I would go down and have a carrot, an apple, a beet, a stick of celery, and a plug of ginger juice—and as I was told by the young Dave Dalton, who used to be English, that’s what they would stick in a horse’s ass to get its tails in the air and to prance in dressage. So when I drank this concoction that I got from the juice man, it made my ears stick out. What in the what the!!! Anyway, more often than not I would write and sing a scat where there weren’t lyrics yet, Isha, boo-da-lee-ga / a-moo-shoo-bada / gee-da-la-a-zoo-ba / oobi-doobi-aba—thank you for the inspiration Louis Armstrong, and fill up what the scat sounded like with lyrics (didn’t often make sense—but who gives a fuck ’cause it’s only rock ’n’ roll). I sang that over the chorus line one day and I went, “Oh! Fuck!” Hel-loo! I’m home!

  I—want to be your lover

  I—wanna wrap you in rubber

  As pink as the sheets that we lay on

  Cuz pink it’s my favorite crayon, yeah

  Pink it was love at first sight

  Pink when I turn out the light

  Pink it’s like red but not quite

  And I think everything is going to be all right

  No matter what we do tonight

  Veni, vidi, vici. We came, we saw, we needed a Kleenex! Get the fuck out of Dodge! Songs are stories, didn’t all troubadour stories turn into songs and didn’t all the tales lead to the same thing? Saving the queen? Getting the girl? Wrapping her in rubber?

  Glen Ballard started as producer on Nine Lives, but Joe Perry eventually threw him out because Glen was working on tracking and vocals and wasn’t paying attention to Joe’s leads or working with him on guitar sounds. I said, “Why don’t you talk to Glen? Ya know it’s your guitar . . . get your own sounds.” So along comes Kevin Shirley, who won Joe’s heart by turning his amp up to 11 and who swore he’d rock the album like it hadn’t been rocked before and needed to from the beginning. Kevin loved his rock ’n’ roll so much and his style was so saw-toothed that he was dubbed the Caveman . . . just what Aerosmith needed. The version of “Pink,” bits and pieces of vocals, and miscellaneous trackage was still there from the Florida sessions with Glen Ballard. I had to scrap all the vocals and start over, which didn’t come easy for me. Joe and Tim had talked Sony into thinking the album was jinxed by Glen Ballard since Tom, Brad, and Joey hadn’t come to Florida yet. We were neck deep in the writing process when Glen hired Steve Ferrone to do the drum tracks. So we planned to layer in the guitars once they came down—unlike any other album we’d done yet. But no, I’d already sung all the vocals and harmonies to the album and I was being told we were going to have to rerecord the whole fucking thing . . . and Joey’s having a nervous breakdown? Joe couldn’t get his guitar sounds and since Brad and Tom weren’t on it yet, what the fuck, let’s just scrap it and rerecord everything.

  All the songs on Nine Lives would have been great except Ballard’s guys, who were in the studio during the early recording sessions and looked like zombies because they’d been up all night fixing Joe’s timing on the tracks. Glen had a reason to his rhyme and wanted the stuff put to grid and the last thing Joe wanted was to be told what to do. Another reason why he had him ousted. The funny thing is, Jack Douglas had been adjusting Joe’s guitar timing all the way back to the seventies. It’s what producers did and still do.

  I walk around like a woman during pregnancy when I’m working on an album. I don’t listen to anyone else’s music, I just want to marinate in my own creativity. A song is constructed like a tree—from roots to branches, and when it’s done you hope it bears fruit. You need a first verse, next a second verse, then a prechorus, which is the titillating foreplay, then the cum shot—the payoff—being your chorus line. Then comes the bridge, which should bring you back to the chorus line, then boo-ya . . . SCORE! It’s outta the park. So satisfying, because that chorus, when it works, epiphanates everything you ever thought of in your life (or whatever that song made you think about).

  You think you’re in love

  Like it’s a real sure thing

  But every time you fall

  You get your ass in a sling

  You used to be strong

  But now it’s ooh baby please

  ’Cause falling in love is so hard on the knees

  It’s got to pay off so deliciously that you just can’t wipe it off! A little something that gets inside of you and changes your everything—that’s always been my aim. And by the way, there are nine others on that album that are also out of the park. No one can catch you—they’re on the hood of a car on Forty-ninth Street from Yankee Stadium. It went where?

  While writing Nine Lives at the Marlin Hotel, Bono and Larry from U2 came to visit. We played the tracks for them and they were blown away—nice to have a solid wall to bounce your ball off. During the sessions, one of the finer producers on the planet, Tom Lord Alge, was in the studio in the basement of the Marlin Hotel diddlin’ around with a song called “If It Makes You Happy,” which it did, extremely, after hearing it. That night Joe and I went upstairs and wrote “Kiss Your Past Goodbye,” which was a premonition of the coming breakup between Collins and me. When I listen to it now it’s very eerie.

  It’s later than a deuce of ticks

  Your broken heart, it needs a fix

  You’re feedin’ off a high that would not last

  And people they don’t seem to care

  And sorry just don’t cut it, yeah

  It seems to me you’re gettin’ nowhere fast

  So kiss . . . your . . . past

  Or kiss your ass good-bye

  I can pull a rabbit out of a hat by pulling a song out of scat. I hear lyrics in my sleep, little embryonic words poking up out of the scat plasma. This is a pretty different approach to the way a professional songwriter like Diane Warren works. Diane sits down at the piano and out come the words and melody together fully formed, the way you might build a chair. . . .

  I could stay awake just to hear you breathing

  Watch you smile while you are sleeping

  While you’re far away and dreaming

  I could spend my life in this sweet surrender

  I could stay lost in this moment forever.

  I’d hear one of her songs and think, “How many affairs does this woman have to have to know how to put it so brilliantly? Oddly enough, she’s married to a parrot named Buttwing who keeps repeating, ‘That’s brilliant!’ and ‘I love it!’ ” Whereas my songs come out of the muck and mire of the muddy stream of consciousness—or, as I like to say, the stream of unconsciousness.

  I think my way of writing songs comes from when I first heard hymns and organ music in church when God was still there under the pulpit in a box covered with red velvet. I grew up Presbyterian, I’ve walked with God all my life; you know, I always said my prayers. The music was so profound and stimulating, a cosmic harmony pouring into the soul of the congregation. That’s why the organ is so powerful. People hear God in a song because music infuses your mind with melody . . . it floods your brain like the fluid in the placenta. So, in church, hearing those giant organs sweetly playing swelling chords and melodic soaring hymns, I just fell into that angelic sound. And at home, from age one or two, I was lullabied to sleep with the notes of Debussy and Schubert. Looking for God? I did not come here looking for God, I brought Her with me.

  Diane wrote “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and that song, by the way, has one of the most brilliant front lines ever. If you’re in love and your significant other ever says to you, “I could fall asleep just to hear you breathing,” you’re going to drop and give her twenty right there on the floor. Or nestle your head in her neck and believe that you
wouldn’t be able to live the rest of your life without her. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

  Songs are nothing but air and pure emotion, but they have intense effects on people’s lives. When people relate passionately to a song, all that goes on in their lives gets attached to the song—and the music never stops. All they want to do is tell me how that was their wedding song, or what they played at their wedding.

  How about the two guys who created the BlackBerry—they came up with the idea while smoking pot and listening to “Sweet Emotion.” At the Kennedy Honors, a prominent democratic politician told me she had made love for the first time listening to “Sweet Emotion.” Half the current government of the United States has made love to Joe Perry’s licks.

  John Kalodner introduced me to Diane Warren—it was an A&R man’s equation: big band, big money, big really talented songwriter—big band needs big hit. I’d written a bunch of things with her before. When I was working on “Devil’s Got a New Disguise,” I went out to her house in Malibu. She has a piano that looks out over the ocean and I said, “So, we’re gonna write a song. How do we start?” “Well, I’ll play you something.” She played me a couple things, mostly ballady and it wasn’t working. That’s when I sat down and carved out that beginning piano live and voilà! “Devil’s Got a New Disguise” started to take shape. Some years later, the song was completed. . . .

  Sweet Susie Q she was a revel

  No angel wings, more like the devil

  She was so hot, so cool and nasty

  Believe it or not, here’s what she asked me . . .

  If you need love with no condition

  Let’s Do the Do, honey, I’m on a mission

  The girl’s so bitchin’, my backbone’s twitchin’

  ’Cause down in hell’s kitchen

  The devil’s got a new disguise

  I’m on a mission, a proposition

  It’s intuition ’cause

  The devil’s got a new disguise

  And so that was “Devil’s Got a New Disguise.” Another song Diane wrote that we recorded was “Painted on My Heart.”

  And I’ve still got your face

  Painted on my heart

  Scrawled upon my soul

  Etched upon my memory, baby