(Credits: Gage Skidmore)
Mon 12 January 2026 9:50, UK
To be a lead singer for a rock band, you need to have more than a few attributes. But two essential ones are that you need to have a great voice, and you need to have a unique style. Steven Tyler has practically patented his signature style of moving across the stage, and he certainly has the lungs to pull off a note or two.
Although he may have started out from behind the drums, Tyler always knew that his true calling was at the lip of the stage, working his charisma and his dynamic vocal range alongside the sounds of Joe Perry’s guitar. While the Aerosmith frontman could rightly claim to have one of the most enduring voices in rock history, he admits that no one’s coming close to what Robert Plant did a few years before him.
When Tyler first started getting the bug to become a musician, it was always secondhand from the British invasion. From the minute that acts like The Beatles made their way across the pond, Tyler knew that he wanted to devote his life to making people feel the way he felt hearing rock and roll for the first time.
If there’s one band that followed Tyler around for most of his career, it would have to be The Rolling Stones. Despite having his unique approach to vocals, Tyler would come under fire numerous times for sounding a bit too close to what Mick Jagger was doing, especially considering the similar dynamic between him and Perry compared to Jagger and Keith Richards.
For all of the Stones worship that Tyler admitted to engaging in, he admitted that his first true love came from The Yardbirds. Featuring a young hotshot guitarist named Jimmy Page, Tyler made sure to keep his ears close to the ground once Page went out on his own, eventually finding Robert Plant in the psychedelic outfit The Band of Joy.
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After playing mostly blues covers on their first album, Led Zeppelin would be born out of the basics of rock and roll riffs, turning a handful of notes into amazing pieces like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Ramble On’. Even though Tyler eventually got the opportunity to jam alongside the members of Zeppelin, he admitted that there was no way that he could compete with what Plant had already done.
During the 2000s, Tyler remembered going into a few rehearsals with Zeppelin to see what would happen without Plant. While Tyler turned in a masterclass performance most of the time, what Plant had done was close to perfection in his mind.
When talking about returning to Aerosmith, Tyler said that Plant existed in a class by himself, saying, “I didn’t think a band like Led Zeppelin needed a singer like me. They already had the best; they were the best. Robert used to say, ‘I think I could sing and shear a few sheep at the same time.’ I can think of a few things I could do while singing, but that ain’t one of them”.
It is difficult not to draw comparisons between Plant and Tyler, but while they both have long hair and want to hit the heavy rock sound, the rest of their patter feels way off. The truth is, Plant is compared to every single rock singer because he is the archetypal version we know and love. Without his blueprint there is a huge swathe of music that just wouldn;t have sounded the same.
Tyler was also on the ground floor for Zeppelin’s first handful of records as well, famously getting emotional when he first saw them play their famous gig at the Boston Tea Party on their first tour of the US. The Aerosmith frontman may have been able to throw down whenever the opportunity called for it, but finding a band that could rock as hard as Zeppelin is something that was never going to happen again.
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