Hole In My Soul

The big ballad from Aerosmith's album Nine Lives, "Hole in My Soul" didn't have the impact of their previous scorchers ("Amazing," "Cryin'"), but it certainly had the elements of a hit. The song was written by lead singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry with help from Desmond Child, who dragged the band kicking and screaming into the land of ballads when he co-wrote their 1987 hit "Angel." Child's forte is big chorus and compelling story, which combined with Tyler's penchant for ribald humor, could make for some interesting lyrics. That combination of humor and heartbreak is apparent on this track, with lines like "For every love letter written, there's another one burned" and "Now I sleep with my boots on but you're still in my head." Released as the third single from the album, it tapped out at #51 in America and was abandoned from live shows after the Nine Lives tour.

In our interview with Brad Whitford, the Aerosmith guitarist said that of all the band's songs, he was most surprised when this one stalled on the charts. "Maybe it was just too depressing, but I remember being in the studio thinking that this sounded to me like it would end up being played on the radio or having more appeal than it ended up having," he said. "But that's what we go through. You create this music and you always have high hopes for it and it doesn't always work out that way."

In the video for this song, a socially hapless high school geek (in the world of Aerosmith videos, even dweebs are impossibly good looking), does a Weird Science, creating his dream woman in a lab. This woman is played by Eva Mendes, who had yet to appear in a movie. In this video, she is stolen away by a football player at the school, who is played by another pre-famous actor: Seann William Scott. At the end of the video, which was directed by Andy Morahan (he did "November Rain" for Guns N' Roses), our hero gets some love from a real girl: the classmate who was interested in him the whole time. Like most Aerosmith videos, footage of the band is interspersed with scenes that play out the story.