AEROSMITH's TOM HAMILTON On Next Album: 'We Need To Get Closer To Understanding Our History'

AEROSMITH bassist Tom Hamilton believes that the group needs to find a more cohesive musical voice on its follow-up to 2012's "Music from Another Dimension!", which fell far short of the band's expectations. Released on November 6, 2012, the CD debuted at No. 5 on The Billboard 200 album chart, selling 63,000 copies in its first week of release. The group's previous collection of new songs, 2001's "Just Push Play", entered the chart at No. 2 with sales of 240,000 copies.

"I think that the band needs to have a unified concept of what AEROSMITH is to our fans," Hamilton tells Detroit Free Press in a new interview. "Without trying to pander and do market research, we need to get closer to understanding our history and the band that the world wants AEROSMITH to be. I think it's a combination of the stuff we did in the '70s when we really started learning the studio, like the 'Toys [In The Attic]' album and the 'Rocks' album, and then some from the later era of the band, when we did the 'Pump' album and the 'Permanent Vacation' album. I think those albums describe what this band is about musically."

Hamilton also spoke about the role that the producer should play in the making of AEROSMITH's next album, which the bassist believes should come together "within the next year or two."

"One of the flaws about our band is we really need a coach," he told the Detroit Free Press. "For 'Toys' and 'Rocks', we had [producer] Jack Douglas. He was a great leader and a coach. Then we had Bruce Fairbairn on those other two albums, 'Permanent Vacation' and 'Pump'. And he was a very strong leader character, like a coach on a sports team. We need that to do our best record. The thing is, you have to get everybody in the band to allow that to happen. Some people want to be the boss, and they want to say they did everything. And they want to have that attitude of: 'We don't need a producer. We know how to make a damn record. We'll produce it ourselves, by God.' That's a big mistake, I think, for 90% percent of bands. We've committed that mistake a lot.

"So when I talk about being back in the studio in a year or two, I mean, with a figure like that being involved. And that's something the band has to struggle with and go through whatever we have to go through to get everybody up and running on that idea."

AEROSMITH guitarist Joe Perry recently spoke frankly about "Music from Another Dimension!"'s shortcomings, and blamed some of its problems in reaching a bigger audience on both music and film business politics, revealing to Classic Rock magazine, "There is some ass-kicking stuff on that record, but there's also some stuff that, frankly, I'd rather we had left off. There were two big setbacks beyond our control. The president of our record label left three weeks before our record was released, and it got tossed in the bin. We'd been told that the lead song, 'Legendary Child', was going to be in the 'G.I. Joe' movie, and Paramount would put literally millions of dollars into the record."

Perry remembered the moment the band knew that the floor had fallen out from under them. "We were in the limo on the way to the TV studio to play the song on 'American Idol' when we learnt the movie was delayed by six months," he said. "I still feel the album didn't get to have its day in the sun."