(Credits: Gage Skidmore)
Fri 16 January 2026 0:00, UK
The kind of vocal tone that Steven Tyler got out of his voice is the kind of thing that no one can truly replicate.
As much as Aerosmith was pulling from the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, there was no way that any frontman could have done what Tyler did when he reached into that higher register. This was a much different approach than what everyone had seen before, but he would be the first to say that the giants before him really set him on the path to embrace that inner demon.
After all, the biggest names in blues never tried to sound pristine whenever they made their classics. Howlin’ Wolf was meant to sound like he was coming from Hell when playing some of his finest tunes, and while Tyler had a great deal of respect for the blues, it wasn’t until he heard someone like Janis Joplin that his screaming register started to come into view. This was a woman totally uninhibited with her vocal cords, and Tyler would do anything to get anywhere near that register.
But there were two sides to Tyler’s approach to rock and roll. There was the bluesy side that everyone knows and loves whenever the band breaks into ‘Walk This Way’, but there’s also that rhythmic pulse that came from R&B. Every single member of Aerosmith would say that James Brown played a huge influence on getting them to where they are today, and while it took them a while to truly get their footing, their melodic sensibilities had as much to do with Motown as they had to do with The Beatles.
Tyler worshipped at the altar of Lennon and McCartney whenever he made his more tuneful songs, but there’s no competing with the vocalists who started to make Hitsville one of the biggest cities in America. Everyone from Stevie Wonder to The Jackson 5 were making the kind of records that no one could have imagined, but Tyler had a soft spot whenever he listened to Smokey Robinson sing.
From the moment he started, Robinson never wanted to put too much strain on his voice, and whenever he started singing with The Miracles, the pure emotion in his voice was all that mattered. A song like ‘Ooh Baby Baby’ could have easily fallen apart in anyone else’s hands, but hearing Robinson sing a song like ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ is what truly hooked Tyler back in the day.
The Beatles may have done a brilliant cover of the tune, but Tyler knew there was no replacing what Robinson could do, saying, “It’s the classic opening line for a song, ‘I don’t like you but I love/seems that I’m always thinking of you’. It’s just brilliant. The music was infectious to the point where you made out to it, you made love to it, you went to high school with it. He still plays and still sings great. [He’s] just a national treasure.”
And while Tyler could get overly sentimental when he tried to sing his own ballads, there was always a little bit of Robinson creeping up in his sound every now and again. He wasn’t one for subtlety when he sang, but if you listen to the kind of tone that he brought to some of Aerosmith’s later ballads like ‘Crazy’, he could sell a tune just as well as Robinson could back in the day.
It’s easy for a lot of Aerosmith fans to go back to the likes of The Stones and The Beatles to get the story of their influences, but if they really do their homework, it’s about more than the riffs. It’s about the singing that set people’s worlds on fire, and there wasn’t a soul listening to Motown back in the day that didn’t have a chance of being emotionally wrecked by the right Miracles song.
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