Lyrics were not important at this stage, as long as Steven felt comfortable singing some kind of phonetic melody. We'd then take these ideas into a conference room where we had some small amplifiers and electronic drums and a keyboard, and we'd jam and would record that into my laptop. I'd collect all these ideas, and pretty soon we'd start to develop them and put them together, and once it sounded like there was something there, it would go up on the chalkboard behind me. "I had a small office in Aerosmith's studio/office complex, and the guys would come in with ideas, either by giving me a file or, for most of the time, they'd play me a riff on an acoustic guitar. Work on the album began in the summer of 2011 at the band's Boston headquarters, where they have a large recording studio called Pandora's Box. Music From Another Dimension also saw them do much more writing together as a band than had previously been the case. For Douglas, the secret lay in getting the five band members to work and play together again, and in harking back sonically to the rawness of the records he made with the band in the '70s. This photo, taken by Aerosmith's Brad Whitford, shows Warren Huart at Pandora's Box.īoth Honkin' On Bobo and Music From Another Dimension have been hailed as Aerosmith's best in years, and "proof that Aerosmith can still rock”. We were honest with each other, and pretty soon we were all going out for dinner and hanging out in each other's houses and working together as a band.” Pandora's Rocks But during the process the guys realised that they are pretty much a family and that they really like each other when they work together! Because I have a history with them, it's hard for them to pull tricks on me, because I know them well and can give them one look and go: 'Come on, that's BS!' It's a producer's job to keep everything on track, whether I have to be a priest or a shrink or a dad, whatever it takes. So yeah, there were some problems, and some animosity - the usual stuff - and a lot of laundry that needed to be aired. On the phone from his home in New York, Douglas recalls: "The band had not been together for some time, and before I got involved there was a long time when it didn't look like this album was going to happen. Big-name producers like Rick Rubin and Brendan O'Brien were name-checked, but nothing emerged until the band decided to go back to basics with the legendary Jack Douglas, who produced the band's best-selling albums Get Your Wings (1974), Toys In The Attic (1975), Rocks (1976) and Draw The Line (1977), as well as their more recent album of blues covers, Honkin' On Bobo (2004). But it wasn't all retro.Īerosmith's Music From Another Dimension, released in November, is their first album of new music since 2001's Just Push Play, and the result of a particularly long gestation process the first sessions apparently date as far back as 2006. Their latest album saw Aerosmith return to their roots, with Jack Douglas in the producer's chair.