Sweet Emotion

Steven Tyler wrote this about how frustrated he was with the band. They were doing a lot of drugs at the time and tensions often ran high, especially between Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry. The song is also a statement about doing your own thing without letting others bring you down.

Tyler attributes the first lines, "Talk about things that nobody cares, wearing out things things that nobody wears," to Joe Perry's girlfriend Elissa because of the incredible amount of tension between them. A lot of this tension was caused by their drug use, and in particular one night when Tyler came to Perry's hotel room looking for heroin, and he and Elissa sent him away, refusing to share their drugs. In the Aerosmith autobiography Walk This Way, Tyler says these lines were his "angry side talking, and adds that when he wrote the lyrics, "Can't say baby where I'll be in a year," he was thinking, "but it will be at least 1000 miles away from you!"

The music was based on the bass line Tom Hamilton came up with. Tyler wrote the lyrics (Hamilton was known as "Mr. Sweet Emotion"), and they put the song together in a jam session. Hamilton says it was the band's producer, Jack Douglas, who coaxed the bassline out of him. Near the end of recording for the Toys In The Attic album, Douglas asked if anyone in the band had some spare riffs lying around, and Hamilton produced this one, which went over well with his bandmates. Hamilton recalls in Walk This Way: "I smoked a bowl or two and wrote the arrangements, the guitar parts. Steven took the intro, turned it around, changed key, and we used it as the tag, the resolution of the song. Brad, Joey, and I went home. Next time we heard 'Sweet Emotion,' it had the overdubs, the vocals, and I flipped out. I loved what they did with it."