Blud brothers: how Aerosmith and Yungblud made magic together

One May afternoon earlier this year, Dominic Harrison, aka Yungblud, found himself in a room with the singer and guitarist at the heart of Aerosmith, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. Perry, he already knew a little. Tyler, he was meeting for the first time.

From a distance, Harrison had felt a link to Tyler for a long time. Not just because of the Aerosmith posters on the walls of his grandfather and father’s Doncaster guitar shop. Not just because of the Aerosmith music he’d absorbed alongside all the other classic rock he’d heard in his childhood. There was also something more fundamental. “I think I always really loved Steven because a lot of people, since I was a kid, said I looked like him,” Harrison says. “I think when you have that mouth…”

It was an association the young Harrison happily embraced. “There was a really famous image of him on a motorbike, and he had this mouth, and he had his tattoo out, and he had a pair of bootcut jeans on, and his sleeves were high in a little crop top – that’s basically just Rockstar 101, isn’t it? If you get told at nine years old that you look like a rock star, you kind of wear it as a badge of honour.”

When Harrison flew out to meet Tyler and Perry in Los Angeles, a few weeks before his 28th birthday, he had little sense of what to expect. Even if it turned out that they might work together on some music, it wasn’t at all obvious to him what his role might be, or what they might plan to achieve. ‘Was I going to come in as a songwriter? As a producer? As a collaborator? As a thing?’ he mused.

Any uncertainty was heightened by the fact that Tyler was only beginning to emerge from a period of enforced hibernation, and it was far from clear what he would be in-terested in doing, willing or even be able to do. Ahead of the meeting, Harrison had arranged, with Joe Perry’s blessing, for his producer Matt Schwartz to be waiting in a nearby studio (one owned by Perry’s friend and occasional Hollywood Vampires bandmate Johnny Depp), but there was no certainty that it would be needed. It entirely depended upon what happened next.

“Because on a first date,” reasons Harrison, “you either fuck or you hate each other. You know what I mean? Steven is going to love me or hate me. And I’m going to love Steven or I’m going to not like him. Two fucking frontmen. You either do this [Harrison mimes, with his hands, two opposing forces in confrontation] or you fucking love each other. I obviously went in, nervous, going, ‘I hope fucking Steven Tyler loves me because he’s one of my idols.’ But you just never know.” Harrison then describes that very first moment they met: “I remember I walked up the stairs past this kitchen, and Joe stood there, and Steven’s on the piano. He looks at me, and I look at him, and I’m like, ‘All right?’ And he mimics my accent and goes, ‘All right?’ And it was just like: ‘We’re going to be mates. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to write a song together, but we’re going to be fucking mates.’”

“It was, like, insane, meeting Dom for the first time,” says Tyler. “I fucking fell in love with him, first sight. All I could think of was – dare I say something that’s been used to death? – he was like a brother from another mother. It was like looking at myself in the mirror. Like: ‘Wait, where have I seen this fucking guy before?’”

Just 20 minutes later, they were in the studio.

It was on 9 September 2023, three dates into Aerosmith’s farewell Peace Out tour, performing an arena show in Elmont, New York, when all of the band’s plans went astray.

“We had a fucking beautiful stage,” Tyler remembers. “It was so big, it was pushed out to the middle, right underneath the scoreboard. I went to the back of the stage, be-hind the drum set. There was a ramp where you put extra people in, and I was slapping five with a bunch of girls – I slapped a girl with my other hand and my right hand slipped off the railing and I landed on my throat. My neck hit the railing. I felt it when I hit it, but it didn’t bother me at the time. I didn’t feel what I’d really done to myself until the next morning. I woke up and I couldn’t swallow. I got so fucking scared.”

“We didn’t know if Steven was going to be able to talk for three months, until the swelling went down,” remembers Perry, “and then if he was going to be able to sing again. So we were in limbo for a long time about what we could do.”

“On a first date, you either fuck or you hate each other. You know what I mean? Steven is going to love me or hate me”

Yungblud

Aerosmith’s remaining concert dates were postponed, then cancelled, and eventually an announcement was made that since “a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible” the band had made the “heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision” to retire from touring.

“Aerosmith’s been our lives for 50 years,” says Perry, “It was traumatic for everybody, but obviously, most for him. He loves it – he loves performing. He’s been doing it since he was six years old. And to have that taken away – it was a world-changing event for all of us.”

Since then, the Steven Tyler who walked into the Los Angeles studio in May 2025 had made a couple of brief cameo onstage appearances earlier in the year, but little else had been heard from him. No matter. Today, as soon as Harrison played them a fragment of a new song that he had been messing around with on the tour bus – “I got a whole lot of problems, but it don’t matter when I’m with you” – Tyler immediately joined in.

“He just harmonised in his weird way,” Harrison says. “Instantly, like the coolest fucking shit.”

And they were off.

“I think what blew him away,” says Harrison, “was how similar our voices are and our registers are. Going up to those notes, he was just like, ‘I’ve not met a singer who sings like me.’”

“The camaraderie was sick,” Tyler concurs. “I looked at him, and I thought, ‘Holy fuck, this kid is me.’ I mean, I hate but I love to say that because I know what he’s going to be. I know where he’s going. I know where he’s heading.”

“I think working with Dom, it pushed him a little,” says Perry. “Doing the duets where they would actually be standing side by side, singing into the mic, I could see he was getting inspired.”

“Me and Steven, I think we’re just from the same fucking planet,” Harrison says. “We’re crazy, we’re full of energy. We’re, like, extremely chaotic, but extremely ourselves. And we hit it XXXX instantly. There’s this beautiful, friendly competition between us in the studio. I think he had been worried about his voice, and I’m going [Harrison sings a piercingly high passage], and he’s trying to do them, and he’s forgetting that that’s a fucking top C sharp – that’s way up there. And he’s hitting these notes again by not thinking about it, after his injury, and I’m hitting the notes, because I’m like, ‘Holy fuck, that’s Steven Tyler.’”

“He was nailing some stuff,” Perry concurs, of Tyler, “that I didn’t think I’d ever hear again.”

By that evening, a first song, ‘Problems’, was all but finished. “And everyone was like, ‘Holy shit – what time are we in tomorrow?’” says Harrison. While Schwarz worked on putting the pieces together, Harrison played a new riff and Tyler rolled out some chords on the piano which Harrison recorded on his iPhone. That would become the following day’s song, ‘My Only Angel’. At the end of the second day, a similar thing happened: Harrison and Tyler picked up guitars, some sad words were sung – “I’ve been hurting you a long time” – and they’d made a start on what would be the third day’s song, ‘A Thousand Days’.

“The camaraderie was sick. I looked at him, and I thought, ‘Holy fuck, this kid is me’”

Steven Tyler

“It was magic,” says Harrison. “It was young and it was old, and it was colliding. It was energy and it was wisdom, and it was colliding. It was sex appeal then and sex appeal now, and it was colliding. This utter explosion of chaos and energy and fucking sensibility.”

“Just the experience of writing songs with him was so much fun,” says Tyler. “He’s ambitious to a beautiful fault, dare I say. He writes songs like I do, from an experiential madness. But I think madness comes easy on the crossroads of failure and easy street.”

“Steven’s a dog; I’m a dog – you know what I mean?” says Harrison. “And me and Steven instantly wanted to play. We were like, ‘Let’s fucking go!’ I think I was obviously in-spired by my heroes. I think they were inspired by my kind of complete young, naive fearlessness.”

As for Perry, “Joe’s a cat” Harrison explains, and proceeds to describe how the cat chooses its moment to step in and steer the dogs’ path: “There’s like this pretty, soaring ‘I feel like I can fly’ anthem that me and Steven, the dreamers, are writing, and Perry just goes ‘Bang!’ And he just makes it cowboy and sloppy and rock and ‘fuck it’. Joe Perry throws a grenade on it, and we all end up scarred, but cool as fuck. He adds the roll to the rock.”

Harrison kept extending his stay in California, and in the end they worked together for a week, finishing off these three songs. But there had still been no discussion about what it was that they had all been creating. Harrison wondered whether this might be a Toxic Twins record (the name Tyler and Perry call themselves as a duo). Or part of a new Aerosmith record, one where in due course Tyler would be replacing all of Harrison’s parts.

On their final day working, he got his answer.

“I just remember we were stood outside by a pool. And Perry, he don’t really talk much. He just goes, like, ‘So are we fucking doing this then?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean “Are we doing this?’” He’s like, ‘Aerosmith and Yungblud – are we doing this?’ I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Are we doing this? Hell yeah! With everything I’ve got. I’d love to. That would be crazy.’ What a dream.”

The initial connection between the Aerosmith and Yungblud camps had actually been made the year before. Gavin Rudolph, son of Aerosmith’s manager Larry Rudolph, knew Harrison and his manager Tommas Arnby, and of Harrison’s affinity for Aerosmith, and connections were made. Perry subsequently remembers the suggestion being floated that “it’d be cool if the guys in the Aerosmith could hook up with Yungblud.” Soon, their managements were discussing possible forms of collaboration. As a result, in July 2024,

as Tyler continued to recuperate, Harrison went to Perry’s home in Sarasota, Florida, where they began to get to know each other and worked on some as-yet-unreleased songs.

“I had a vision of bringing multiple generations of rock together,” Harrison recalls. And he had other slightly less high-flown motivations, too: “For me, I was like, ‘If I get to meet Joe Perry, I get to hear stories about what the fuck was it like when you were playing back then? What was Madison Square Garden like in 1972? What did Jimmy Page look like with brown hair?’”

Perry says that he was impressed by what he saw in Harrison and later told Tyler, “We’ve seen them come, we’ve seen them go, but this guy definitely has it.” It was that first Sarasota meeting which led, eventually, to the full-on collaboration in Los Angeles.

But, even after LA, they weren’t done.

A fourth song for what would become the five-track Aerosmith / Yungblud EP One More Time, ‘Wild Woman’, was worked on via FaceTime while Harrison was in Santorini. Then, in August, the three of them reconvened in Florida, finishing up what they had and recording a fifth song, a part-remix, part-new interpretation of ‘Back in the Saddle’, the old Aerosmith staple that Harrison liked to play before his live shows. Even after that, there was a final session back in Los Angeles to record some alternative acoustic versions, during which, improbably, Steve Martin was induced to add a banjo part, recorded on his iPhone, to ‘My Only Angel’. In September, they performed together on stage for the first time at the VMAs in New York, Harrison and Tyler duetting on ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’, Perry at their side, as the final song in Yungblud’s Ozzy Osbourne tribute. And on it goes.

“I would bet there’s going to be another Aerosmith gig on the
horizon. I know we have to play another show. I just feel it in my heart”

Joe Perry

What the three of them seem to treasure is that all of this has come together without any overarching masterplan or grand sense of calculation.

“It was just so organic and so natural,” says Perry. “One thing led to another.”

“I think with any music,” Harrison argues, “especially with creating something that is an explosion of worlds that will sound like it’s not been put together in a boardroom, it needs to be a fucking accident.”

And as for where it goes from here, that also remains open.

“Who knows, man?” says Harrison, who alludes to at least one other song having appeared from nowhere when they last met. “It might turn into an album in the next six months. If we keep getting back together, we’ll just add to it in a very 2025 way.”

For Aerosmith’s part, there’s a sense that – whether or not it might involve their new friend – they can see the possibility of doors that had seemed closed beginning to reo-pen.

“I can sing for an hour or two,” Tyler at first tells me. “But I’m not sure if I could do a whole show right now.” But then he starts talking about Dr Steven Zeitels, the renowned Boston specialist he is working with, “the best laryngologist in the world”. So, I ask: is he now hoping he can get back to where he can do whole shows and tours?

“Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “It’s in my blood. And I mean, fuck – every time I go on stage, it’s like we’re still on tour. You know, there’s no stronger narcotic than rock ’n’ roll music to me. And believe me, I’ve done all of them.”

Perry alludes to a similar ambition, albeit in a more tempered way. “I would bet there’s going to be another Aerosmith gig on the horizon,” he says. “I know we have to play another show. I just feel it in my heart. At this point, it’s like, it would be just great to get out and do at least one more gig. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the fans.”

And maybe there is a version of this future that might include their latest collaborator, for this is how it all seems from Harrison’s perspective: “I think that it is as up in the air as when we were writing the music. It’s been as free and as real and as ‘fuck it’ and as chaotic and as mental and as crazy as when the music got made. We’re either going to go and do a world tour or we’re going to do nothing. But we’ll do it with truth, and we’ll see how it goes, and we’ll say, ‘Fuck it’ in any capacity we do. It’ll either come out and it’ll be a moment, and it’ll be a magazine cover, and it’ll be an EP, and it will be history. Or it will turn into two nights at the Albert Hall and one night at [Boston’s] Fenway Park. And I don’t know if that’s going to happen. We’ve all talked about it, but we’ll see.”

He offers this final declaration: “It’s fucking as real as it comes, man. And it’s as fucking ‘I don’t know’ as it comes! Which is rock ’n’ roll in its purest, most exciting form. ‘Are they going to turn up on stage tonight?’ Who fucking knows! But when they do, it’s going to be fucking real.”

Taken from the December/January issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Order your copy of the magazine here.

‘One More Time’ EP vinyl and print magazine bundle available EXCLUSIVELY from the Yungblud store. Print copies ONLY available online from rollingstone.co.uk and uk.yungbludstore.com  and selected online retailers.

Photographs include custom and archived Chrome Hearts
Creative direction by Jesse Jo Stark