Aerosmith's next album might be "on the bench, in pieces," waiting for the group to resume recording after it finishes touring in mid-September, but guitarist Joe Perry's next solo album is just about ready to go.
Perry tells Billboard.com that he's just finishing mixing the follow-up to 2005's Grammy Award-nominated "Joe Perry" and expects it to be mastered next week. He plans to release a single in late July or early August, with the album coming out this fall.
"
It's a lot different than the last one,"
Perry reports. "
The last one was a straight-ahead rocker. This one's got some different things on it." The album was recorded in about seven weeks at
Perry's home studio, The Boneyard; he shares lead vocal duties with a German singer his wife,
Billie, discovered on the Internet, and there's one instrumental track.
David Hull from the
Joe Perry Project and
Ben Tileston, who plays with two of
Perry's sons in TAB The Band, were also involved.
"We were working around the clock, through weekends and everything, and it was all live," Perry says. "In fact, a lot of the vocals are live along with the rest of the band. (Sound) was bleeding from one track to another; if somebody had a bad take everybody had a bad take, and we played it 'til we got a good one. Of course we went in and overdubbed a lot of the other stuff, but the energy is there. You can feel it."
The one thing Perry doesn't have yet is a title; for that he's holding a contest via Twitter, letting fans make suggestions. If one of the fan's is chosen, the winner will receive a guitar. "It's tough, obviously, without having heard the record for people to name it," he notes, "but we may find something really good. There've already been a bunch that are possibilities."
Once the album is released Perry hopes to hit the road with his own band for "a short, fast, hard tour. That's what I'm really looking forward to...getting back out there with some old friends and some other musicians and doing it like the old days."
The Aerosmith album, its first since 2004's "Honkin' On Bobo," will also be a consideration at that point as the group - which wraps up its current tour with ZZ Top on Sept. 16 - hits the studio again with producer Brendan O'Brien. "That is the next project right after we get off the road," Perry says. "We'll take a little break and then put it together. I'm hoping it will come together pretty fast, but I've been saying that for five years, so..."
Thanks for the report to Billboard.com.
D
God I hate twitter tho.