Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)

This song is about a guy who finds himself constantly being used by women for oral sex. Steven Tyler often writes playfully sexual lyrics where the woman is in control (see "Walk This Way"), and this is a great example. Our hero gets emotionally involved with these girls, but they just want one thing, and it "ain't one of these." If fact, these women don't even need a man for this, so he's fighting an uphill battle.

Tyler wrote this with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and with Glen Ballard, who is best known for co-piloting Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album and producing Wilson Phillips, but has worked with artists in a range of genres and had no trouble rocking out with Aerosmith. In a Songfacts interview with Ballard, he told the story: "I wrote that in Miami at the Marlin Hotel, Suite 205, with Joe Perry and Steven Tyler. We were down there for six months making a record and I had this whole set-up in my suite at the Marlin. Steven Tyler, talk about hearing somebody sing! He could sing for 12 hours straight when we were writing and never get tired. I don't think I've ever been around a singer who never gets vocally tired. I mean, cast-iron pipes. His range is utterly tremendous - he's one of the greatest singers and it goes unrecognized just how many things he can do. We were just trying to be funny. We were just having fun that day, and it's Aerosmith, so of course I'm not going to do a Wilson Phillips song with Aerosmith. We started off with a riff and we made it right there in that hotel room. That was some of the most fun I've ever spent, and the guys were all sober then, so I was getting them high on coffee all day long. I had an espresso machine in my room and Steven was totally into it. We would drink like 10 cups of coffee and write. It's a coffee high for the whole album."

The music video follows the travails of a masochist, opening with a scene where he is trapped in a box and leashed by his tongue. It was directed by Michael Bay, who filled it with quick cuts of striking, but often nonsensical imagery, something he became known for in his film work (Pearl Harbor, Transformers. It won for Best Rock Video at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards.