10 Perfect Rock Songs Wasted On Terrible Albums

Success can be a bit of a strange beast when you first come across it in the music industry. Aerosmith might not have been the most in demand rock stars in the world since the ‘70s, but the late ‘90s were about to be extremely kind to them, giving the band their first ever #1 hit on the radio with I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing for the soundtrack to Armageddon. It’s every band’s dream to reach the top of the charts, but the minute that Aerosmith got there, they started to make some of the worst decisions of their career.

Compared to their Bad Boys From Boston persona, Just Push Play is one of the most jarring pivots into pop that any band has ever made, sounding much more like a ‘00s pop starlet record that just happens to have Steven Tyler singing on every single track. Even though songs like Jaded and Fly Away From Here might be the last thing that you want a band like Aerosmith to play, the album at least opens strong with Beyond Beautiful, having a bit of an Eastern flavor with the addition of sitar before blasting into a decent riff from Joe Perry.

While the topic of the song is pretty standard by Aerosmith standards, the new instruments actually give it much more weight this time around, with Steven actually bringing out his screaming pipes on the chorus most of the time. Just don’t get used to this kind of thing for the rest of the record, which tends to sound more like Lenny Kravitz if he were trying to write hits for Britney Spears instead of the badass rock and roll band most of us remembered. For just a few short minutes though, it looked like we were in for the most epic Aerosmith album yet.